INFANT PhD profile: The INNOVATE study: INvestigatiNg cOgnitive deVelopment in preterm & full-term infAnTs using Eye-tracking
Sonia Lenehan is pursuing a PhD in neurodevelopment and the environment, as well as investigating eye-tracking as an assessment tool in 18-month-old infants. Sonia completed her BSc Neuroscience in UCC in 2016. She began her PhD with the INFANT centre in 2017 looking at how the environment affects neurodevelopment. The project has looked at nutrition, massage, and moderate-to-late preterm birth with a large part of her PhD looking at the INNOVATE studying and investigating the feasibility of eye-tracking as an assessment tool.
Sonia’s planned thesis title is: Investigating the effect of breastfeeding, massage, and moderate-to-late premature birth on the developing brain.
The objectives of this thesis are:
1. To investigate the effect breastfeeding at two months has on the cognitive outcome at five years.
2. To conduct a systematic review to answer the research question: Does the development of social cognition in moderate to late preterm differ from that in term infants?
3. To explore eye-tracking as a measure of cognition in term 18-month olds.
4. To correlate the measure of eye-tracking with the Griffith-III Neurodevelopmental Assessment.
5. To investigate if the development of cognition differs between late preterm and term infants at 18 months of age, as measured by eye-tracking.
In 2020 Sonia was an Irish Research Council Awardee which funded her research until 2021 when she began her new role as the project manager of Science4SightLoss.
As Sonia comes to the end of her PhD, she hopes that this research will have provided an extra tool in the toolbox for assessing children around the world.
🗣️Check out this new publication by INFANT Research Centre Researchers
đź’ˇ’An Exploration Of The Introduction Of Oral Immunotherapy In A Paediatric Population With IgE-Mediated Egg Allergy: A Review Of The Literature’
👏By Yukta Ramesh, Caoimhe Cronin & Dr Juan Enrique Trujillo Wurttele
🗣️Check out this new publication by INFANT Research Centre Researchers!
đź’ˇ’Risk taking & self-care behaviours amongst adolescents & young adults with food allergies’
👏By Hannah Keohane, Caoimhe Cronin & Dr Juan Enrique Trujillo Wurttele
🎉INFANT Research Centre Researchers recent paper has been selected for highlight in the Editor’s Focus of the #PediatricResearchJournal
👏Congrats Dr Antoine Giraud, Dr Carol Stephens, Prof Geraldine Boylan, & Dr Brian Walsh
🔎Read the paper here: https://lnkd.in/egCtAAXb
🗣️Dr Juan Enrique Trujillo Wurttele presented the e-poster:
đź’ˇ’A decade of milk ladder in Cork University Hospital: are we achieving our goals?’
Caroline O’Connor is pursuing a PhD in the area of improving and standardising the care of twin pregnancies with INFANT and NPEC at UCC and is funded by the Irish research council.
Caroline completed her BSc Midwifery in the UCC in 2010. After graduating she travelled to Essex in the UK where she worked as a Band 6 Midwife in one of the largest and busiest maternity units in the country. She returned home at the end of 2011 and began working as an agency midwife in various maternity hospitals around Ireland.
Caroline went on to work as a research associate with a medical diagnostics company in conjunction with University College Cork involved in the development of a blood test which can predict the risk that a woman will develop preeclampsia later in their pregnancy.
Caroline has completed a postgraduate diploma with UCC in Preparation for Birth and Parenthood and enjoys providing antenatal classes in her spare time.
Caroline’s planned thesis is titled: Multiple pregnancy: An investigation of the risk factors and outcomes in the ROI (The MILESTONE study)
The objectives of the study are:
Caroline really wants to contribute to improving and standardising the care of twin pregnancies and especially improving the experience of the parents using the services.
Caroline is conducting this research with the Pregnancy Loss Research Group based at INFANT and the NPEC. Her supervisors are Professor Keelin O’Donoghue (INFANT), and Dr Sara Leitao (NPEC).
INFANT Lead Investigator Dr Mark O’Sullivan and Dr Alison O’Shea of the Neurobell project are the overall winners of the 2022 Ideate Ireland competition which took place last week.
The €15,000 top prize was awarded to Neurobell a pocket-sized brain monitor with automated seizure detection for newborns, which builds on the previous research of the INFANT Research Centre in the field of AI-based interpretation of neonatal EEG.
“The Ideate programme really pushed us to challenge our market assumptions by completing customer discovery across different stakeholder groups,” said O’Sullivan.
“We now have a clear understanding of where the clinical need for our technology is greatest and how best to target that market. It is a key milestone in getting us ready for private investment, and winning the competition will provide us with the momentum and support to bring our product to market successfully.”
INFANT researcher Sarusha Pillay and INFANT PI Dr Fergus McCarthy won the first runner up prize of €7,000 for their project pHetalSafe, which seeks to detect and prevent fetal hypoxia and assess fetal well-being during labour.
We are immensely proud of our colleagues for this amazing achievement. We look forward to the expansion of their work and wish them the very best in achieving their global ambition.
