Dr O’Muircheartaigh is a Professor of Developmental Neuroscience and Imaging at the Department of Forensic and Neurodevelopmental Sciences at Denmark Hill and the Centre for the Developing Brain at St Thomas', joining KCL way back in 2005.

Early life adversity, environmental and neurological, can have long lasting consequences for the brain, altering what is considered to be “typical” neurodevelopment. Dr O’Muircheartaigh’s research focus on how the human brain develops in vivo from fetal life in utero to late adolescence, focusing on the effect of preterm birth, childhood epilepsy and clinical exposures on the trajectory of brain development.

His lab is highly multi-disciplinary and the team includes neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists, computer scientists and paediatricians. He collaborates directly with clinical teams within King’s Health Partners as well as across the MRC Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders, aiming to translate findings forward to practical clinical use and back for mechanistic pre-clinical validation.

Research Interests

• MRI in the foetus and neonatal brain
• Brain networks in childhood epilepsy
• Novel analytic approaches to diffusion MRI
• Statistically modelling of brain development

Teaching

Brain Development, functional MRI, Brain Anatomy, Neurodevelopmental Conditions