Senior Lecturer
Contact Details
Email: c.bulgarelli@bbk.ac.uk
Twitter: cbulgarelli01
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiara-bulgarelli-a000a7aa
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 then joined as a post-doc 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 was in charge of analysing the fNIRS datasets and defining a standardised analysis pipeline for fNIRS data collected in global health.
In March 2022, I was awarded an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to study the development of empathy in toddlers. I am excited to have joined the first world’s ToddlerLab at Birkbeck, where I am using cutting-edge techniques, such as wearable fNIRS and virtual-reality, to assess empathic reactions in 3-to-5-year-olds. In Oct 2023, I was awarded the pump prime feasibility study funds from the Respect4Neurodevelopment network (funded by the EPSRC) to lead an interdisciplinary team to validate the used of the virtual-reality set up and wearable neuroimaging in the ToddlerLab for the study of neurodivergent children.
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
Jan. 2019 – Feb. 2022: Post-doctoral Research Associate in the BRIGHT Project
Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering at UCL and Boston’s Children’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School.
Supervisors: Prof. Clare Elwell, Prof. Charles Nelson
Oct. 2018 – Jan. 2019: Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Post-doctoral Researcher
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London.
Supervisors: Prof. Denis Mareschal, Prof. Victoria Southgate, Prof. Antonia Hamilton
Sept. 2014 – Aug. 2015: Research Assistant
Psychobiology and Clinical Psychiatry laboratory, Scientific Institute San-Raffaele Hospital and University, Milan (Italy).
Supervisors: Prof. Francesco Benedetti
Jan. 2014 – June 2014: Visiting Scholar
Brain and Creativity Institute, Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (CA, USA).
Supervisors: Prof. Antonio Damasio, Dr. Jonas Kaplan
Sept. 2013 – Aug. 2014: Postgraduate Internship
Psychobiology and Clinical Psychiatry laboratory, Scientific Institute San Raffaele Hospital and University, Milan (Italy).
Supervisors: Prof. Francesco Benedetti
Selected Publications
Growth in early infancy drives optimal brain functional connectivity which predicts cognitive flexibility in later childhood
Towards inclusive developmental neuroimaging: personalising virtual-reality (VR) and diffuse optical tomography (DOT) assessment for neurodivergent young children
Cross-paradigm fNIRS brain activity in 1-month-old infants across The Gambia and the United Kingdom
How to design real-world functional near-infrared spectroscopy studies: a primer
Investigating the effect of channel pruning on functional near-infrared spectroscopy data collected from children aged 5 to 24 months
Links
New study in the Toddlerlab CAVE: https://birkbeck.shorthandstories.com/new-research-birkbeck-todderlab/index.html