Postdoc in the SCAN Lab at NYU || SMC (BS), QMUL (MSc), & USC (PhD) alum || brain development, environmental exposures, stress and inflammation 🧠
New York, NY
Joined May 2020
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Presenting the last of my PhD dissertation! With all of my work demonstrating air pollution as a neurotoxicant (through inflammatory mechanisms), I wanted to know if good sleep could alleviate some negative impacts on air pollution on the adolescent brain
rdcu.be/eOhQQ
TL;DR - Objectively measured sleep quantity and quality changed the relationship between prenatal and childhood gaseous pollutant exposure and white matter microstructure, but we think sleep efficiency (a proxy for quality) may be more important than duration.
With this publication, my entire PhD dissertation is out there in the world 🙂 I could not be more grateful for the @hertinglab and I’m so proud of what we've accomplished over the last 5 years.
update! last week, I successfully defended my PhD in neuroscience. The path to becoming Dr. Cotter was not as straightforward as 12-year-old me thought it would be but we made it. So grateful to my mentor, my lab, and my friends and fam for helping me achieve this lifelong dream.
Devyn Cotter retweeted
So, just checking, the free-speech folks who didn't like 'wokeness' because it curtailed their free expression are now ok with the gov't scrubbing taxpayer funded health & science communications and censoring everything with the word "gender" on it?
So… every project gets pulled? The list of words banned is exhaustive. If you can’t see this as the blatant attack on science that it is, I literally can’t help you
Devyn Cotter retweeted
🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.
Devyn Cotter retweeted
I need people to understand how difficult it is to get an NIH grant. You spend months writing a proposal, following strict guidelines that include a detailed multiyear budget, bios of everyone on your team, plans for participant safety & ethical conduct. Then you send it off -1/n
interesting read featuring some work from the @hertinglab !
People in poor communities, who often breathe the worst-quality air, are likely to have more risk factors for brain disorders, stress, lower educational attainment and obesity, compared with those in higher-income areas
go.nature.com/4jcZsDM
important work from the @hertinglab !!
Let’s clear the air for our kids: @KECKSchool_USC finds that air pollution from fossil fuels could be affecting children’s learning and memory. 🧠 today.usc.edu/exposure-to-ce…
the field of environmental neuroscience is growing fast - please see our updated review on how outdoor pollutants affect human neuroimaging outcomes in childhood and adolescence. Congrats @JessMorrel for leading the effort on this massive and v v detail-oriented review!
Happy to share that our team’s systematic review of the impact of outdoor air pollution on the developing brain is now out in preprint!
medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
Devyn Cotter retweeted
August 2024 issue of Trends in Neurosciences:
cell.com/issue/S0166-2236(23…
Free featured articles & more:
cell.com/trends/neuroscience…
On the cover: Outdoor air pollution and brain development, by Megan Herting @HertingLab, Katherine Bottenhorn & @DevynCotter
cell.com/trends/neuroscience…
Anotha one! This time, I present to you the first longitudinal analysis of how low-level air pollution exposure during childhood affects white matter microstructural development over a two-year follow-up period during adolescence, a 🧵: nature.com/articles/s43856-0…
TL;DR We find sex-specific changes to WM maturation in relation to childhood pollutant exposure. Future work should examine pollutant exposure in other developmental windows & across more time points, but we hope this serves as fodder for @EPA to strengthen air quality guidelines
oh yeah, and check out my short blog post on this paper if you don't feel like reading the whole thing (no judgement here) communities.springernature.c…
thank you to the @hertinglab, Herting Lab post-docs @62442katieb & @kharloews, and all my co-authors for their help on this project! always a team effort 🙂