Overview

Role within department: Anna is the postdoctoral research associate to Professor Anna Adlam, working on the UK arm of the international ADAPT-Genetics study, in collaboration with Professor Brad Kurowski, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre, USA. The study looks at genetic and environmental influences of severe paediatric brain injury, and the relationship between them. The results will be used to guide future treatments tailored to the individual (e.g., immediately following the injury, and for later rehabilitative interventions), and increase knowledge in the field of neurorecovery.

Interests: Anna’s last postdoc studied the relationship between maternal self-efficacy and the communicative contingency between the mother and her recently diagnosed deaf baby, and so its impact on the development of that child (communicative contingency is known to improve developmental progress). The project investigated the impact of a change in self-efficacy on this through an intervention to help improve a mother’s view of her abilities. Anna is interested in generalising this concept and finding out more about the impact of self-belief in a person in recovery, e.g., from brain injury, and, extending it to the support groups connected. The interactions between environment and biology, based on the bio-psych-social model, and how we might measure and change to improve circumstances she finds interesting. Through her role working on the ADAPT-Genetics study, this gives an opportunity to explore these themes further.

Research Group Links: CEDAR Child and Adolescent Neuropsychology (CAN); Follow us on twitter: @CANexeter & @UK-TOPS

Current Projects: ADAPT-Genetics study, CEDAR Child and Adolescent Neuropsychology (CAN)

Qualifications

BSc (Hons) Speech Sciences, University College London, 2001

MRes Cognition & Computational Neuroscience, University of Birmingham, 2004

PhD, University of Birmingham, 2008

Career

Following her undergraduate studies, Anna spent a few years in industry, working as an IT Specialist at IBM. She was a tester and then coordinated teams in application and patch control for the software for a global financial trading project. Anna then went to Birmingham University for an MRes, where she worked with Clinical Psychologist Prof Jan Oyebode on an experiment looking at self-awareness of memory decline in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Her subsequent projects were supervised by Professors Glyn Humphreys and Antje S Meyer, looking at phonological and semantic processing in visual search, which extended then to her PhD. She worked with healthy young and older adult participants and adults with brain damage to look at object recognition in visual search measuring RT, eye gaze behaviour and ERPs, and differences between the groups in access to long term memory. From there, Anna was a postdoctoral research fellow at Nottingham University, with Dr Deborah James at the National Biomedical Research Unit in Hearing, NBRUH (2009-10). She looked at biological measures of self-efficacy change in the mothers of deaf infants as part of an NIHR intervention study. However, after a year Anna took a career break to raise her three children (2010-2018), before moving to Exeter with her family last year.

Research group links

• Clinical