Neurodevelopment
Early origins of health and disease
How does inequality impact a baby’s health?
Led by Dr Divyangana Rakesh, King’s College London
Inequalities in social and economic environments can influence brain development, cognition, and mental health across childhood and adolescence.
In recent work funded by the Medical Research Council and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, Divyangana and her team have shown that differences in children’s household and neighbourhood environments are associated with changes in the brain which may contribute to disparities in cognitive and emotional development.
She has also shown that differences in economic inequality at a societal level can shape teenage development, independent of family circumstances. However, these findings are based on data from the US, and it remains unknown whether this trend applies globally.
The Emerging Leaders Prize will therefore enable Divyangana and her team to create a catalogue of developmental neuroimaging datasets across a wider range of countries. This will lay the groundwork for more representative studies of how broader social and economic environments shape brain development in children and infants.
The prize will also allow Divyangana and her team to extend this work to earlier stages of development, examining how macroeconomic inequality relates to socio-emotional and cognitive development in infancy, and whether differences in brain development help explain these associations.