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Chiara Bulgarelli

Postdoctoral Researcher

Research Interests

My main research interest is to study neurodevelopment during social interactions to explore mechanisms of change from infancy to childhood. During my PhD, I explored mechanisms underlying self-other differentiation in 18 months. Moreover, I advanced techniques to study infant brain connectivity using fNIRS, a relatively new neuroimaging technique widely used in developmental neuroscience.
 
I am currently a post-doc in the Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) project, a big longitudinal project that aims to establish brain function-for-age curves of infants who grow in a low-resource context. Within this project, I am in charge of analysing the fNIRS datasets and defining a standardised analysis pipeline for fNIRS data collected in global health.

 

Education 

PhD Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck College, London

2015 - 2019

MSc Clinical Psychology

Vita-Salute San Raffaele University - Milan (Italy)

2011 - 2013

BSc Psychology Science

Università degli Studi di Parma - Parma (Italy)

2008 - 2011 

 

Research Posts

Research Fellow

Department of Neuropsychiatric Science, Scientific Institute San Raffaele Hospital and University Milan (Italy)

2014 - 2015

Visiting Scholar

University of Southern California, Los Angeles

Brain and Creativity Institute, Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center

Jan 2014 - April 2014

Post-Lauream Internship

Department of Neuropsychiatry, Scientific Institute San Raffaele Hospital and University– Milan (Italy)

2013 - 2014

 

Publications

Bulgarelli, C., Blasi, A., Pollonini, L., Lloyd-Fox, S., Pirazzoli, L., Perdue, K.L., Nelson, C.A., Elwell, C.E. Standardising an infant fNIRS analysis pipeline to investigate neurodevelopment in global health, in Biophotonics Congress: Biomedical Optics 2020 (Translational, Microscopy, OCT, OTS, BRAIN), OSA Technical Digest (Optical Society of America, 2020), paper BM2C.2.

Bulgarelli, C., de Klerk, C.C.J.M., Richards, J.E., Southgate, V., Hamilton, A., Blasi, A. The developmental trajectory of fronto‐temporoparietal connectivity as a proxy of the default mode network: a longitudinal fNIRS investigation. Human Brain Mapping. March 2020:hbm.24974. doi:10.1002/hbm.24974

Bulgarelli, C., Blasi, de Klerk, C., Richards, J.E, Hamilton, A. Southgate, V. (2019). Fronto-temporoparietal connectivity and self-awareness in 18-month-olds: A resting state fNIRS study, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 100676.

de Klerk, C., Bulgarelli, C. Hamilton, A., Southgate, V., (2019). Selective facial mimicry of linguistic in-group over out-group members in preverbal infants. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 183, 33-47.

Di Lorenzo R, Pirazzoli L, Blasi A, Bulgarelli, C., et al. Recommendations for motion correction of infant fNIRS data applicable to multiple data sets and acquisition systems. Neuroimage. 2019;200(4):511-527.

Bulgarelli, C., Blasi, A., Arridge, S., Powell, S., Brigadoi, S., de Klerk, C., Southgate, V., Penny, W., Tak, S., Hamilton, A. (2018). Dynamic Causal Modelling on infant fNIRS data: a validation study on a simultaneously recorded fNIRS-fMRI dataset. NeuroImage. 175, 413-424.

 

Links

Email: cbulga01@mail.bbk.ac.uk, c.bulgarelli@ucl.ac.uk

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiara-bulgarelli-a000a7aa