UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh
4401 Penn Avenue – Room 2539B; Pittsburgh, PA

Hi! I’m Laura, and I’m a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Biomedical Informatics.

I have a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, but I saw my first MRI dataset analyzed, and I’ve never looked back. I have a PhD from Western University, Canada, focusing on developmental neuroscience. I was a part of Dr. Rhodri Cusack’s infant imaging lab, and I have experience using MRI to scan infants, and, through the Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping (Western University), experience in designing specialized MRI behavioral tasks for use in both 3T and 7T scanners. My previous work has included using diffusion weighted imaging to learn about how distributed structural networks mature over the first year of postnatal life. I’ve also worked on creating infant remote testing platforms for visual preference tasks.

I’m interested in understanding early life and brain development, with a focus on cognition and executive function. During my previous Postdoctoral Scholar appointment on the Pittsburgh Psychiatry IMPACT T32, I worked with Dr. Bea Luna and gained experience using MRI to quantify striatal tissue iron from resting state fMRI. I used both in-house and large datasets (dHCP; N=464) to characterize how striatal iron changed across the first year of postnatal life.

I’m particularly passionate about applying what we learn in normative development to clinical work. The trajectory of striatal iron deposition has been linked to later cognitive, reward, and executive function. In the PIRC, I am interested in measuring striatal iron in clinical populations, including both preterm infants and infants with congenital heart disease. These groups often present with later cognitive dysfunction, and I am interested in mapping the relationship between early iron deposition and outcomes.

In my free time, you can find me chasing after my Portuguese water dog and the perfect cup of coffee.