MEET OUR TEAM
Principal Investigators
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Emma Duerden, PhD is a Canada Research Chair in Neuroscience and Learning Disorders. She is the scientific lead of the Developing Brain research program. She is an Assistant Professor in Applied Psychology in the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario. She is also a Scientist in the Maternal, Fetal and Newborn Health Division at the Children's Health Research Institute. She received her undergraduate degree in Psychology from McGill University. She trained at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) for her Master's degree in Neuroscience. She completed her PhD in Neuroscience at University of Montreal. Her research examines early life stress and the association with brain development and cognitive outcomes in infants with critical illness and children with neurodevelopmental disorders.
She has been honoured with several local, provincial and national awards for her research including the Early Researcher Award (Province of Ontario), CHRI Scientist of the Year (2023), the Future Leaders in Brain Research Award (Brain Canada), and the Early Career Investigator award in maternal, reproductive, child and youth health (CIHR). |
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Sandrine de Ribaupierre, MD, FRCSC is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario and working as a paediatric neurosurgeon with some involvement in paediatric and adult trauma and adult epilepsy and endoscopic surgery.
Dr. de Ribaupierre earned her MD at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. After a Neurosurgery residency in Lausanne (Switzerland), she completed an epilepsy fellowship in the Fondation Rothschild in Paris (France), then a paediatric neurosurgery fellowship in the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Her main research areas are medical education, using virtual and augmented reality as an educational tool, with a special interest in neuroanatomy. She is also interested in surgical simulation with the development and evaluation of AR/VR tools for surgical simulation. Her clinical research focuses on epilepsy, cognition and functional imaging. |
Research Scientists
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Emily Nichols, PhD is Research Scientist and Adjunct Research Professor, studying the developing brain using neuroimaging, starting from the fetus until early childhood. She is working to develop preprocessing pipelines to address some of the key difficulties in fetal neuroimaging, and to develop prenatal biomarkers of Intrauterine Growth Restriction. Her graduate work in neuroscience involved the study of bilingual language processing, and she also completed a post doc in computational neuroscience, using techniques in the field of machine learning.
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COLLABORATORS
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Charles (Charlie) McKenzie, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University. He is also an Associate Scientist at the Robarts Research Institute and the Lawson Health Research Institute.
Research in the McKenzie Lab focuses on the development of new MRI image acquisition and reconstruction techniques, with a particular focus on MRI during pregnancy. They are developing new methods for direct imaging of fetal and placental metabolism, in addition to techniques for detecting the consequences of metabolic dysfunction during pregnancy |
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Barbra de Vrijer, MD, FRCSC is an Associate Professor in Maternal-Fetal medicine in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at Western University. She is also the division head of Maternal-Fetal Medicine at Victoria Hospital, London Health Sciences centre. Additionally, she is an Associate Scientist at the Children's Health Research Institute and Lawson Health Research Institute.
Dr. de Vrijer's research currently specializes in the abnormal uterine environment and its effects on the fetus, with a focus on the adverse effects of maternal obesity. Dr. de Vrijer has initiated a multidisciplinary clinical Pregnancy Research Group and is establishing herself as a leading research clinician in the field of pregnancy, specializing in the obese population, with current work on imaging, markers of inflammation, and the microbiome. |
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Roy Eagleson, PhD is a Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Western Ontario, an Associate Scientist at the Robarts Research Institute, and a Scientist and Principal Investigator at CSTAR (The Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advanced Robotics research centre; part of the London Health Sciences Centre.
Research Interests include 3D Biomedical Visualization and Surgical Simulation, Human-Computer Interface Design for Surgical Skills Training, Haptic Interfaces and Interactive Immersive Graphical Interfaces (Volumetric Visualization with GPU programming) |
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Genevieve Eastabrook, MD, FRCSC is an associate professor in Maternal-Fetal Medicine in the department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at Western University. She is also the director of Maternal-Fetal Medicine Subspecialty Training Program, at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University. Additionally, she is a Scientist at the Children's Health Research Institute.
As a member of the Pregnancy Research Group, Dr. Eastabrook conducts clinical research focusing on better identification of maternal risk factors associated with adverse pregnancy outcome, detection of abnormal fetal metabolism and placental function, with the goal to improve pregnancy outcome and long term consequences of abnormal intrauterine environment such as childhood obesity and diabetes. |
phd students
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Sarah Al-Saoud, BA is completing her Masters in Education in the Field of School and Applied Child Psychology and is conducting research on neuromelanin imaging in children with neurodevelopmental disorders.
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Research Assistants
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Michelle Fang
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Tajveer Ubhi
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