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Biography
I am a developmental cognitive neuroscientist interested in understanding how attention, executive functions, and memory changes from infancy to childhood. My more recent research focusses on how contextual factors such as caregiver abilities, caregiving, socio-economic status, health status, schooling, etc. impact cognitive development. To do this, I use a combination of questionnaire, behavioural, brain imaging and interview tools in caregivers and children. I have published over 30 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, Developmental Science, NeuroImage, Imaging Neuroscience etc. My research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (>£1 million in total funding). I recently led the first-ever longitudinal study looking at social interactions between caregivers and infants in the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham. Here, we recruited a sample of 90 families from the East Midlands area and followed them for three years - from infancy to early childhood. We found several interesting findings - particularly, that working memory-related looking behaviours and brain function in infants is impacted by their caregivers' own looking behaviours, behavioural regulation, and inhibitory control, as well as their own brain activation. In ongoing work, we are examining whether characteristics of social interactions between caregivers and their infants are predictive of infant visual working memory behaviour and brain function. For example, are longer periods of joint attention, high-quality scaffolding, more complex interactions or even synchrony between caregivers and infants predictive of child executive functions? My academic history has contributed immensely to my line of research inquiry. I have an undergraduate degree in electronic engineering, a PhD in visual neuroscience, and postdoctoral experience in cognitive and developmental psychology. I took up the position of Assistant Professor at the University of Stirling in 2018, and then moved to the University of Nottingham in 2020. As a result, I am enthusiastic about networking in the STEM sciences, and routinely collaborate with computer scientists, physicists, statisticians, clinicians, and non-profit organizations. As an example, from 2017 onwards, I have collaborated with Community Empowerment Lab, a non-profit organization in Lucknow, India focussed on improving developmental outcomes in infants. During knowledge exchange activities with this group, I trained 10 community-based research assistants on experimental and brain imaging data collection from children in low- and high-resources settings - some were included as authors in two publications. In exchange, I received training in appropriate communications and culture- and community-specific assessments from families in low-resource settings. Thus far, together, we have co-written research articles on infant neurocognition. My research on visual cognition in developmental populations, and broader collaborative research intersecting other disciplines has received press coverage through BBC Radio Nottingham, NottsTV, The Psychologist, Leakey Foundation, Sapiens, and other news outlets. You can follow updates from my research on X and Bluesky. True to the fabric of the research I conduct on context, I'm driven to promoting EDI through every avenue. To enable this, I have been a member of the Vision and Visibility Committee of Fetal, Infant and Toddler Neuroimaging Society. I am also a member of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion Committee for the International society for functional near-infrared spectroscopy. In this committee, my role is to review and select conference submissions from researchers from under-privileged, under-represented and/or minority backgrounds for receiving bursaries to cover registration and travel costs. I have reviewed grant applications for the Leverhulme Trust. I serve as an Editorial Board member of the Infant and Behaviour Development journal, and an ad-hoc reviewer for numerous child cognition and neuroimaging journals - more recently, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Frontiers, Imaging Neuroscience, NeuroImage, PLOS, Biomedical Signal Processing. Both at Nottingham and previous institutions, I have convened other postgraduate modules, final year modules and facilitated Practical Methods seminars. I currently convene and deliver content-based and training-based lectures on Developmental Disorders in Context, a postgraduate module for MSc Developmental Disorders students and MSci students. I have supervised PhD students, postgraduate projects, final year projects, and research assistants who come from culturally- and neuro-diverse backgrounds. I have served as internal examiner, external examiner, and Chair roles during PhD examinations.
Selected Publications
DELGADO REYES L, WIJEAKUMAR S, MAGNOTTA VA, FORBES SH and SPENCER JP, 2020. The functional brain networks that underlie visual working memory in the first two years of life. NeuroImage. 219, 116971 (In Press.)
WIJEAKUMAR S, KUMAR A, DELGADO REYES LM, TIWARI M and SPENCER JP, 2019. Early adversity in rural India impacts the brain networks underlying visual working memory. Developmental science. 22(5), e12822 WIJEAKUMAR S, HUPPERT TJ, MAGNOTTA VA, BUSS AT and SPENCER JP, 2016. Validating an image-based fNIRS approach with fMRI and a working memory task. NeuroImage. 147, 204-218