Dr Laura Katus: Early adversity, culture and neurodevelopment

Goldsmiths Psychology is delighted to welcome Dr Laura Katus, University of Greenwich, who will present her research on Early adversity, culture and neurodevelopment

Abstract:
The first years of life are a period of rapid brain development, but the environments in which this development unfolds vary enormously across the world. Much of what we know about early neurodevelopment, however, has historically been based on children growing up in high-income settings. In this talk, I will explore how early environments shape brain and cognitive development, drawing primarily on findings from the Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) project, a longitudinal study following infants in the UK and rural Gambia.
I will consider how exposures associated with poverty and adversity become embedded in early developmental trajectories, and what longitudinal measures of brain function and behaviour can tell us about when and how developmental differences emerge. I will also discuss some of the methodological and conceptual challenges involved in studying neurodevelopment across diverse cultural and socioeconomic contexts, including whether the measures and assumptions developed in high-income settings capture development equally well elsewhere. Finally, I will look ahead to the next generation of global developmental neuroscience, including approaches that move beyond documenting developmental inequalities towards identifying modifiable mechanisms and developing targeted interventions that may help buffer children from adverse early environments.

Bio:
Dr Laura Katus is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Greenwich. Her research examines how early environments shape brain development during infancy and childhood, with a particular focus on the effects of adversity and on children growing up in low- and middle-income countries. She specialises in infant-friendly neuroimaging methods, including electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and her doctoral research at UCL included the first EEG studies conducted with young infants in sub-Saharan Africa.
Following her PhD in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Laura held an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge before joining Greenwich in 2022. She is a collaborator on international longitudinal research including the Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) project, which investigates early neurodevelopment in the UK and The Gambia. Her wider research interests include cognition and psychosocial adjustment across development and the intergenerational transmission of adversity. Alongside her academic work, Laura has contributed to international policy initiatives relating to childhood adversity, including consultancy and advisory work with the WHO Brain Health Unit, UNESCO, UNICEF and Think Equal. She is also an Associate Editor at Developmental Science and a member of the ESRC Peer Review Panel.

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