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• neuroscience and mental health

• Paediatrics

• Neonatology
• Neurophysiology

The INFANT research centre is focused on perinatal health. We are a multidisciplinary group comprising clinicians, scientists engineers and research support staff. This fellowship will be focused on newborn brain research and we have an international reputation in this area particularly in neonatal seizures, neonatal neurophysiology, encephalopathy and prematurity. We also have a number of programmes focused on biomarker discovery. As a fellow in our centre you will join a vibrant multidisciplinary team and will register with the department of Paediatrics & Child Health for your PhD. Further details about our centre, team and research programmes can be found here: www.infantcentre.ie

We have a number of projects for prospective students:
1. Sleep architecture in the newborn infant in the intensive care unit. In this project you will assess both the quality and quantity of sleep in newborn babies admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit and determine the impact on neurodevelopment. This project will involve the recruitment of a prospective cohort of infants and following them up to the age of 2 years.

2. Sensory evoked potentials (SEP) for outcome prediction in the newborns with encephalopathy. In this project the candidate will learn a number of neurophysiological techniques and then recruit a cohort of neonates for SEP monitoring. The results will be compared to the predictive ability of multichannel EEG.

3. Biomarkers of hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy and seizures in neonates. In this project a cohort of neonates with encephalopathy will be recruited and the ability of specific blood biomarkers to assess the severity of encephalopathy and predict long term outcome will be assessed.