Clíona Kelly, PhD, from the laboratory of Helena Rutherford, and Jivesh (Jiv) Ramduny, PhD, from the laboratory of Arielle Baskin-Sommers, have been selected to receive the 2024 Kavli Postdoctoral Award for Academic Diversity.
The Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine is committed to fostering and supporting an inclusive and representative neuroscience research community. The Kavli Postdoctoral Award for Academic Diversity aims to support exceptional scholars who bring a diversity of perspectives, identities, and backgrounds to academic research, including those from groups that are historically underrepresented in the sciences. This Award supports up to two years of mentored research in the neurosciences at Yale University, including salary, benefits, and a research allowance.
Clíona Kelly
After receiving her PhD in Neuroscience and Computer Science from Aston University, Birmingham, U.K., Dr. Kelly joined the Child Study Center at Yale School of Medicine in the summer of 2023 as a postdoctoral fellow. In the Before and After Baby Lab led by Helena Rutherford, Dr Kelly combines her expertise in immersive virtual reality with neuroimaging (Neuro-VR) to develop and record human behavior in naturalistic yet controlled environments. With this set of new tools, she aims to shed light on the interaction between substance use mothers and infants.
Pregnancy is a critical time for both the development of a child and the transition into motherhood, yet the maternal brain is considerably understudied. Of particular interest are the relations between mother and child before and after birth. My research will provide immersive virtual environments that will allow us to investigate the neural underpinnings of mothers' response to infant cues and further our understanding of the maternal brain more widely. Alongside this, I hope to raise awareness of the importance of research into the maternal brain and in particular, collecting a diverse sample within this population.
Clíona Kelly, PhD
Jivesh (Jiv) Ramduny
Jivesh (Jiv) Ramduny joined the Yale Department of Psychology in 2023 as a postdoctoral associate in the Mechanisms of Disinhibition Lab with Arielle Baskin-Sommers. Dr. Ramduny’s program of research aims to facilitate the detection of individual differences in brain-behavior relationships during adolescence through the lens of inclusivity and reproducibility.
I plan to focus my research program on two primary areas. First, I aim to establish a brain-behavior framework that maximizes sample inclusivity by retaining the functional MRI data from high-motion underrepresented youths to encourage the representation of these individuals and fulfill the promise of consortia data to produce generalizable effect sizes across races and ethnicities. Second, I aim to develop a multimodal probabilistic framework to quantify functional fingerprints of neurocognitive processes during adolescence for capturing adolescent cognition and behavior with increased specificity and sensitivity.
Jivesh Ramduny, PhD