My research interest is investigating neural underpinnings of infants’ social abilities over the first years of life. I am intrigued by how areas of our brain respond to social stimuli from very young ages and how some more complex brain networks gradually develop in response to more complicated social abilities.
I received my PhD at the Centre from Brain and Cognitive Development (CBCD), Birkbeck College London, supervised by Prof. Victoria Southgate and Prof. Antonia Hamilton. My dissertation work focused on how emerging self-awareness interacts with the development of social cognitive abilities, such as mimicry and theory of mind. During my PhD I mastered the use of fNIRS, dedicating part of my PhD project to advance connectivity analyses tools for this method and understand the trajectory of functional networks in the developing brain.
I joined the BRIGHT project in January 2019 as a post-doctoral researcher, working on developing standardised age specific pipeline of analysis for fNIRS data, with the ultimate aim of generalise this for other global health teams working with NIRS. This will be achieved in collaboration with the Bangladesh Early Adversity Neuroimaging (BEAN) Project, directed by Prof. Charles Nelson.
For more information on my work, visit: https://cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/people/scientificstaff/chiara-bulgarelli