My interest lies in understanding how human cognition first develops during infancy and early childhood. My background is in Paediatric Neuropsychology and while working with children and teenagers I became more and more interested in the emergence of basic cognitive functions during infancy, enabling all the highly sophisticated processes that we see later on.
I was involved in the data collection at the UK site and have taken several trips to the Keneba field station to help with the lab set up and to train the Gambian colleagues to enable them to independently run the study. Within the BRIGHT project I coordinated the EEG study and was involved in developing new tools to assess early memory functioning.
Nowadays, my main research interest lies in understanding how the early environment shapes the developing brain. I am particularly interested in how early adversity, as is frequently experienced by children in low- and middle-income countries, affects their developmental outcomes. I completed my PhD in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, focussing on memory development in the BRIGHT project cohorts. Upon completion of my PhD in 2019, I joined the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge as a postdoctoral research associate.
For more information on Laura’s work, visit: https://www.gre.ac.uk/people/rep/faculty-of-education-and-health/laura-katus