Marisa Spann
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience·Early-career
Many psychiatric disorders begin long before a child can be diagnosed. One in five children is at risk, but most are not identified until school age.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
- Topics
maternal immune activation
prenatal exposure
fetal MRI
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Test whether maternal inflammation (IL-6) and infection (total immunoglobulin G) during pregnancy relate to salience network connectivity, using fetal MRI at 33–36 weeks and infant MRI at 2–6 weeks and 4 months.
- Use magnetic resonance spectroscopy to measure brain chemicals such as myo-inositol, a marker of activated astroglia, and test whether they track salience network disruptions in fetuses and infants exposed to maternal immune activation.
- Relate prenatal immune activation and early brain measures to infant behavioral reactivity, an index of emotion regulation, using observer-rated behavioral tasks at 4 and 9 months.
- Test whether maternal depression, body mass index, infection and blood glucose are associated with connectivity and structure of behavior-regulating regions such as the dorsal anterior cingulate, using pooled data on about 500 mother–child pairs.
- Examine whether inflammation and glucocorticoid stress hormones help explain links between prenatal exposures and offspring brain development in a subset of the pooled cohort.
More about the research
One clue lies in pregnancy: when a mother's immune system is activated by infection, stress, medical conditions or environmental exposures, her child's later risk of psychiatric disorders rises. This research asks how such prenatal exposures change the developing brain in the womb and in early infancy, before any symptoms appear. The goal is to find early brain-based signs of risk. Two projects support this work. One images fetuses and infants over time. The other pools data on hundreds of mother–child pairs and uses them to train students and early-career researchers.
Why it matters
Most young children who need mental health care never receive it, partly because warning signs are hard to see before age 2. Many pregnant women experience infection, stress or health conditions that trigger inflammation. By linking these exposures to measurable changes in fetal and infant brain wiring, brain chemistry and behavior, this work could reveal early markers of psychiatric risk. Such markers could help clinicians identify at-risk children sooner and guide earlier interventions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Rachel Lean
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Psychology·Early-career
Test whether maternal mind-mindedness, a mother's attunement to her infant's mental states, predicts later parenting sensitivity, using prospective observations of mother-infant interactions from birth to age 3.
Rupa Radhakrishnan
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine how prenatal opioid exposure affects the developing fetal brain over time, using repeated structural and functional fetal brain MRI in pregnancies of mothers with opioid use disorder.
Yoko Nomura
CUNY Queens College, NY·Psychology
Examine how prenatal Superstorm Sandy stress and postnatal stress, including parenting and normal life stress, affect neurodevelopment in children aged 9 to 13, using behavioral, physiological and neuropsychological assessments.
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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