1.Background
Brain injury affects 1 in 100 newborns and has serious and costly lifelong consequences including epilepsy and intellectual disability. In fact, 15-50% of these later conditions have their root in perinatal brain insults. Early-onset epilepsy can have devastating consequences, including to disturb normal cognitive and motor development such that children fail to reach milestones (e.g. crawling) or even lose skills they have already obtained (developmental regression). Hence, there is a huge clinical unmet need to better characterise epilepsy in early life, in order to optimally guide existing therapies, and develop new targeted treatments.
2.Novelty & Importance
To understand epileptogenesis from perinatal risk factors to childhood phenotypes requires an interdisciplinary approach. In this novel project, you will study this topic via three complementary lenses, integrating quantitative measures of brain function (EEG), and structure (MRI), with life course health data (routine medical records from fetal development through childhood). A second novel aspect is our research group’s bidirectional approach to this complex topic, whereby we both track neonates prospectively, i.e. which infants go on to develop epilepsy, as well as review children with epilepsy retrospectively, i.e. mine their medical records for the natural history of their illness.
3.Aims & Objectives
You will test the feasibility of integrating EEG, MRI, and routine health records, and whether these three sources of information in combination offer diagnostic and prognostic value which is greater than the sum of their parts.
4.References
-Koskela, T. […] Whitehead K. Prognostic value of neonatal EEG following therapeutic hypothermia in survivors of hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy. Clinical Neurophysiology 132, 2091–2100 (2021).
-Koskela, T. […] Whitehead, K. Clinical value of cortical bursting in preterm infants with intraventricular haemorrhage. Early Human Development 105840 (2023) doi:10.1016/j.earlhumdev.2023.105840.
-Whitehead. Co-developing sleep-wake and sensory foundations for cognition in the human fetus and newborn. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 71, 101487 (2025).
-Whitehead. Families and patient involvement in designing a project to analyse routine clinical paediatric EEG recordings for research purposes. https://osf.io/epk4g/ (2024).
-Golmohammadi and Whitehead. A co-produced guide for how to explain and use bioelectrical health data for research purposes. https://osf.io/b5kw3/ (2025).
-O’Muircheartaigh, J. […] Edwards DA. Modelling brain development to detect white matter injury in term and preterm born neonates. Brain 143, 467–479 (2020).
-Fenchel, D. […] O’Muircheartaigh, J. Development of Microstructural and Morphological Cortical Profiles in the Neonatal Brain. Cerebral Cortex 30, 5767–5779 (2020).