Hi there! For the coming weeks, our blog will be dedicated to our Young SIOP Award winners!
Please meet Noor Al Dahhan, YI from Canada, in their own words.
I’m a developmental cognitive neuroscientist who uses brain imaging to understand the network mechanisms supporting typical and atypical neurocognitive development. I’m also fundamentally interested in exploring how rehabilitation interventions for brain injuries sustained in childhood can harness the brain’s potential for repair, and how these research findings can be translated to both clinical and educational practice in a direct and meaningful way.
I received my PhD in Neuroscience from Queen’s University in 2018, after which I completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, and Massachusetts General Hospital. I’m currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Hospital for Sick Children with Dr. Donald Mabbott, and a Research Affiliate at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.
My research integrates multimodal neuroimaging techniques and sophisticated computational approaches to address a key unanswered question in cancer neuroscience, which is: how does adaptive and maladaptive changes to structural connectivity of brain networks influence network neural communication, and ultimately predict cognition in typically developing children and adolescents and those with cancer related cognitive impairments? My findings showcase that structural connectivity in the brain directly influences neural communication and cognition, and white matter compromise has an indirect adverse impact on cognition via perturbed neural communication in children and youth treated for brain tumors. I’m further investigating how neuroimaging indices can be utilized as novel biomarkers of cognitive impairments for children and youth treated for brain tumors.
The interdisciplinary focus of my research, which sits at the intersection of clinical neuroscience, developmental cognitive neuroscience, and computational neuroscience, has explicit clinical and educational translational relevance. My work is ultimately key to developing, informing, and monitoring new approaches to ameliorate cognitive late effects in children and youth treated for cancer and enhancing their quality of life.
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