Contact
Supervisors
Prof Emily JH Jones (Birkbeck, University of London & King’s College London)
Dr František Váša (King’s College London)
Dr Rianne Haartsen (Birkbeck, University of London)
Research Interests
My research interests involve using data-driven computational methods to study individual differences in brain-behaviour associations during development, focusing on neurophysiological signatures and anatomical brain networks. I am interested in characterising the link between autistic and ADHD traits with neural oscillatory and connectivity profiles, with a specific focus on the developmental period from infancy to childhood. My work is inspired by transdiagnostic and dimensional accounts of neurodevelopmental conditions, which posits that the underlying biological differences in the brain do not align with current diagnostic categories. I am also interested in working within a neurodiversity-affirmative framework, by shifting away from a medical deficit model of neurodevelopmental conditions towards a research approach that acknowledges the value of diverse ways of thinking and experiencing the world. As such, individuals can have distinct neurotypes which can fall within a typical range of functioning (neurotypical) or diverge from what is considered typical (neurodivergence). Currently, I am working on using unsupervised classification techniques to cluster trajectories of cognitive development and neural oscillatory power in infants and toddlers. I am also beginning a project which will use a multiverse approach to identify optimal brain metrics for predicting neurodevelopmental traits in a large cohort of children from South Africa, with a focus on assessing the predictive power of two complementary and scalable methods of measuring brain development (EEG and low-field MRI) at varying levels of analytic complexity.
Education
PhD Developmental Neuroscience (2023-current)
Birkbeck, University of London & King’s College London
MSci Natural Sciences Specialising in Neuroscience (2019-2023)
University of York
Dissertation: “Decoding the Neural Representation of Facial Emotions Using MEG
Research Experience
2023 – PhD Rotation Project
Internal Representations of Facial Emotions in Schizophrenia supervised by Prof Isabelle Mareschal, Queen Mary University of London
2022 – Research Volunteer
Palva Lab - Systems and computational neuroscience, University of Helsinki
2021, 2022 – Research Volunteer
Nummenmaa Lab - Human Emotion Systems, Turku PET Center, University of Turku
2018 – PhD Shadowing
Shadowed researchers in biomedical science from Jiao Tong University, at Shanghai Ruijin Hospital.
Conference Presentations / Posters
Song, A., Begum-Ali, J., Charman, T., Johnson, M., Haartsen, R., Váša, F., Jones, E. J. & the STAARS Team. (May 2025, Seattle) ‘Transdiagnostic mapping of cognitive development and spectral power in infants at elevated likelihood of Autism and ADHD’. Annual Meeting of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR). (Poster).
Song, A. (September 2024, Staffordshire) ‘Examining relationships between brain and cognition across Autism and ADHD in early development’. Annual Retreat for the London Interdisciplinary Doctoral Programme (LIDo). (Oral Presentation).
Song, A., Begum-Ali, J., Charman, T., Johnson, M., Haartsen, R., Váša, F., Jones, E. J. & the STAARS Team. (September 2024, KCL) ‘Clustering cognitive skills and neural oscillatory power in infants across Autism and ADHD’. Annual Conference of the Respect 4 Neurodevelopment (R4N) Network. (Poster).
Song, A., Zhang, C., Binetti, N., Michalopoulou, P., Shergill, S. & Mareschal, I. (August 2024, Aberdeen) ‘Internal Representations of Facial Emotions in Schizophrenia’. European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP). (Poster).
Song, A., Begum-Ali, J., Charman, T., Johnson, M., Haartsen, R., Váša, F., Jones, E. J. & the STAARS Team. (July 2024, Glasgow) ‘Clustering cognitive skills and neural oscillatory power in infants across Autism and ADHD’. International Conference of Infant Studies (ICIS). (Poster).
Funding
PhD studentship: London Interdisciplinary Doctoral Programme (LIDo), funded by BBSRC and Birkbeck, University of London