Research at Keele profile: Dr Claire Monroy

Which Schools and/or Institutes are you part of?
I'm part of the School of Psychology.
What is your role within research?
I am an early career researcher at Keele. My research focuses on cognitive development in infants and toddlers. Currently, I am the principal investigator on an ESRC-funded project entitled "Neural correlates of visual processing in deaf infants". This project is aiming to understand how hearing loss affects general cognitive and neural processing in deaf infants.
Can you tell us a bit about your role at Keele? What does a typical day look like for you?
As a Lecturer in Psychology, my role involves research, teaching, and administrative work. My research currently focuses on using neuroimaging (EEG) to understand how the infant brain develops and integrates information from sensory experiences. My teaching involves giving lectures in my area of expertise (developmental cognitive neuroscience) and also supervising undergraduate and graduate students on research projects that intersect with my larger research projects.
I don't think I have a "typical" day, as each day can be different depending on the phase of a certain research project, marking periods, student work, laboratory testing needs, and so forth.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
I absolutely love working and interacting with motivated students who challenge my thinking and knowledge of scientific questions, and brilliant colleagues who inspire me to keep pursuing learning and growth.
What is your background? How did you first get involved in research?
My research experiences started during high school. I enrolled in a summer science internship program at the University of California, Santa Barbara (where I grew up) and chose to work in a marine biology lab. I spent that summer collecting water samples and counting phytoplankton under a microscope and wanted to be a marine biologist. During university, I came to be more fascinated by the study of the brain after taking a class on psychological disorders. After university, I worked as a technician in a neuroscience laboratory in Lisbon, Portugal, that looked at the structure and function of Purkinje cells in the cerebellum. Though I loved the research, I found I was more motivated by the scientific questions in the area of cognitive neuroscience, so I left Portugal for a PhD position at the Donders Institute of Brain, Behaviour and Cognition in the Netherlands in the area of developmental cognitive neuroscience (studying the infant brain).
Is your role at Keele your first involvement in research, or do you have previous experience in other roles?
After my PhD, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University, which was my first research project that focussed on infants born with congenital hearing loss.
Please tell us about research projects you are involved with.
My primary research project, as mentioned earlier, is to compare brain activity between babies who are deaf, and babies with normal hearing while they see and process a novel visual stimulus. Past research has led scientists to believe that hearing loss negatively affects cognitive development, in addition to causing difficulties with language development. However, we do not know whether the difference reflects a deficit, as hypothesized, or whether it could actually reflect an adaptation of the deaf infants to their unusual sensory environment. My project will examine the brain activity that underlies visual processing in babies who are born with hearing loss, to (hopefully) understand how hearing and hearing loss affect brain and cognitive development.
I am involved in several other research projects that I find very exciting as well. They may seem quite different from each other - for instance, I am supervising a PhD project on parent-infant storytelling interactions in Zimbabwean families, and I am currently writing up the findings from a study on children's perception of modern dance, to mention a couple. However, they all have the common theme of understanding how the brain and mind develops and how early sensory experiences shape and guide that development. I would love to discuss ideas with anyone who is remotely interested in this area!
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