Dr. Chiara Bulgarelli - Birkbeck, University of London

Overview

Biography

I am a Developmental Neuroscientist.

I completed a BSc at the Università degli Studi di Parma (Italy) and a MSc at the University' Vita Salute San Raffaele di Milano (Italy). I obtained a PhD in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck in 2018 with a thesis titled Investigating emerging self-awareness: its neural underpinnings, the significance of self-recognition, and the relationship with social interactions. I then joined the Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) Project as a Postdoctoral Researcher at University College London (Dept. of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering) from 2019 to 2022.

From March 2022 to February 2025 I have been an Early Career Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow at the world’s first ToddlerLab at Birkbeck where I pioneered the use of cutting-edge technologies to naturalistically study the development of empathy in toddlers.

Since October 2022, I am module convenor and lecturer on the BSc module Introduction to Developmental Psychology at Birkbeck.

Highlights

My main research interest is to study neurodevelopment during social interactions to explore mechanisms of change from infancy to childhood.
I am a neuroscientist with more than ten years’ experience in neuroimaging methods, with deep knowledge of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).
I am module convenor coordinator and lecturer on the BSc Module Introduction to Developmental Psychology at Birkbeck.
My current main research project leverages innovative real-time wearable fNIRS and virtual reality to study the development of empathy during toddler-avatar interactions at the Birkbeck world’s first ToddlerLab.

Office hours

Every Monday from 5-6PM (on Teams, unless stated otherwise). Please email me to arrange in person or online meetings outside these hours.

Web profiles

Professional memberships

Society for Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (SfNIRS)
Emerging Field Group (EFG)
FLUX society for developmental neuroscientists
Post-doc representative for Early Career Researchers in the Respect 4 Neurodevelopment network (R4N)
fNIRS Many Babies consortium

Honours and awards

Early Investigator Award (2nd place) SfNIRS, August 2022
Early Career Research Fellowship Leverhulme Trust, August 2022
Bogue Fellowship University College London, August 2019
Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Fund Fellowship (ISSF) Wellcome Trust, August 2018
Scholarship Italian Health Ministry, August 2016

ORCID

0000-0002-6153-137X

Research

Research interests

neurodevelopment from infancy to childhood
social development
functional near-infrared spectroscopy
naturalistic neuroscience
functional networks development

Research overview

My main research interest is to study neurodevelopment during social interactions to explore mechanisms of change from infancy to childhood.I have a strong passion in understanding social aspects of human nature changes over time, which has always gone hand in hand with my interest in advancing data-analysis methods for functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a non-invasive neuroimaging tool that uses light to measure brain activation. My research is characterised by a high level of interdisciplinarity, as I have always collaborated with Psychologists, Engineers, Physicist, Neuroscientists and Global Health experts.

During my PhD, I explored mechanisms underlying self-other differentiation in 18 months. Moreover, I advanced techniques to study infant brain connectivity using fNIRS, a relatively new neuroimaging technique widely used in developmental neuroscience.

I then joined as a post-doc the Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) project, a big longitudinal project that aims to establish brain function-for-age curves of infants who grow in a low-resource context. Within this project, I was in charge of analysing the fNIRS datasets and defining a standardised analysis pipeline for fNIRS data collected in global health. I have also worked on identifying developmental trajectories of functional connectivity in Gambian infants and its relationship with early growth and later cognitive outcome. This work is crucial to emphasise the importance of the first months of life for infant development and inform strategies of interventions.

As a Research Fellow, I am now pioneering the use of cutting-edge technologies such as wearable fNIRS and virtual-reality to naturalistically study the development of empathy in toddlers, to eventually use VR to train social skills in children.

My work is supported by project grants from the Leverhulme Trust, Wellcome Trust, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, Royal Society.

Research Centres and Institutes

Research Fellow, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development
Honorary Postdoctoral Researcher, University College London, Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering

Research clusters and groups

ECR representative and co-chair of the fNIRS reliability group, Respect4Neurodevelopment

Lab information

SAND - Social Affective Neuroscience in Development

Post doctoral staff

Giulia Serino

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students who are interested in undertaking research in any of my areas of research interest.

Teaching

Introduction to Developmental Psychology (SCPS203H4). Please write an email to introdevpsychology@bbk.ac.uk to ask questions about the course or request a meeting.
Brain and Cognitive Development (PSYC019H6)
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (SCPS149H7)
Child Development in Global Context (SCPS220H7)
Structure and Measurement of the Human Brain (PSYC026H7)
Developmental Psychology (PSYC026H5)
Neuroimaging Methods (PSYC007H7)

Teaching modules

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Developmental Psychology
Child Development in a Global Context
Structure and Measurement of the Human Brain
Brain and Cognitive Development

Publications

Article

Margolis, E.T. and Nelson, P.M. and Fiske, A. and Champaud, J.L.Y. and Olson, H.A. and Gomez, M.J.C. and Dineen, Á.T. and Bulgarelli, Chiara and Troller-Renfree, S.V. and Donald, K.A. and Spann, M.N. and Howell, B. and Scheinost, D. and Korom, M. (2025) Modality-level obstacles and initiatives to improve representation in fetal, infant, and toddler neuroimaging research samples. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 72, pp. 101505. ISSN 1878-9293.
Stute, K. and Gossé, L.K. and Montero-Hernandez, S. and Perkins, G.A. and Yücel, M.A. and Cutini, S. and Durduran, T. and Ehlis, A.-C. and Ferrari, M. and Gervain, J. and Mesquita, R.C. and Orihuela-Espina, F. and Quaresima, V. and Scholkmann, F. and Tachtsidis, I. and Torricelli, A. and Wabnitz, H. and Yodh, A.G. and Carp, S.A. and Dehghani, H. and Fang, Q. and Fantini, S. and Hoshi, Y. and Niu, H. and Obrig, H. and Klein, F. and Artemenko, C. and Bajracharya, A. and Barth, B. and Bartkowski, C. and Borot, L. and Bulgarelli, Chiara and Busch, D.R. and Chojak, M. and DeFreitas, J.M. and Diprossimo, L. and Dresler, T. and Eken, A. and Elsherif, M.M. and Emberson, L.L. and Exner, A. and Ferdous, T.R. and Fiske, A. and Forbes, S.H. and Gemignani, J. and Gerloff, C. and Guérin, S.M.R. and Guevara, E. and Hamilton, A.F. de C. and Hadi Hosseini, S.M. and Jain, D. and Kerr-German, A.N. and Kong, H. and Kroczek, A. and Longhurst, J.K. and Lührs, M. and MacLennan, R.J. and Mehler, D.M.A. and Meidenbauer, K.L. and Moreau, D. and Mutlu, M.C. and Orti, R. and Paranawithana, I. and Pinti, P. and Jounghani, A.R. and Reindl, V. and Ross, N.A. and Sanchez-Alonso, S. and Seidel-Marzi, O. and Shukla, M. and Usama, S.A. and Talati, M. and Vergotte, G. and Atif Yaqub, M. and Yu, C.-C. and Zainodini, H. (2025) The fNIRS glossary project: a consensus-based resource for functional near-infrared spectroscopy terminology. Neurophotonics 12 (2), ISSN 2329-423X.
Collins-Jones, L.H. and Gossé, L.K. and Blanco, B. and Bulgarelli, Chiara and Siddiqui, M. and Vidal-Rosas, E.E. and Duobaitė, N. and Nixon-Hill, R.W. and Smith, G. and Skipper, J. and Sargent, T. and Powell, S. and Everdell, N.L. and Jones, Emily J.H. and Cooper, R.J. (2024) Whole-head high-density diffuse optical tomography to map infant audio-visual responses to social and non-social stimuli. Imaging Neuroscience 2, pp. 1-19. ISSN 2837-6056.
Lloyd-Fox, Sarah and McCann, S. and Milosavljevic, B. and Katus, L. and Blasi Ribera, Anna and Bulgarelli, Chiara and Crespo-Llado, M. and Ghillia, G. and Fadera, T. and Mbye, E. and Mason, Luke and Njai, F. and Njie, O. and Perapoch-Amado, M. and Rozhko, M. and Sosseh, F. and Saidykhan, M. and Touray, E. and Moore, S.E. and Elwell, Clare (2024) The Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) Project: Longitudinal cohort study protocol. Gates Open Research 7, pp. 126. ISSN 2572-4754.
Bulgarelli, Chiara and Pinti, P. and Aburumman, N. and Jones, Emily J.H. (2023) Combining wearable fNIRS and immersive virtual reality to study preschoolers’ social development: a proof-of-principle study on preschoolers’ social preference. Oxford Open Neuroscience 2, ISSN 2753-149X.
Bulgarelli, Chiara and Jones, Emily J.H. (2023) The typical and atypical development of empathy: how big is the gap from lab to field?. JCPP Advances 3 (1), ISSN 2692-9384.
Pirazzoli, L. and Sullivan, E. and Xie, W. and Richards, J.E. and Bulgarelli, Chiara and Lloyd-Fox, S. and Shama, T. and Kakon, S.H. and Haque, R. and Petri, W.A. Jr. and Nelson, C.A. (2022) Association of psychosocial adversity and social information processing in children raised in a low-resource setting: an fNIRS study. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 56, pp. 101125. ISSN 1878-9293.
Janssen, T.W.P. and Grammer, J.K. and Bleichner, M.G. and Bulgarelli, Chiara and Davidesco, I. and Dikker, S. and Jasińska, K.K. and Siugzdaite, R. and Vassena, E. and Vatakis, A. and Zion‐Golumbic, E. and van Atteveldt, N. (2021) Opportunities and limitations of mobile neuroimaging technologies in educational neuroscience. Mind, Brain, and Education 15 (4), pp. 354-370. ISSN 1751-2271.
Collins-Jones, L.H. and Cooper, R.J. and Bulgarelli, Chiara and Blasi Ribera, Anna and Katus, L. and McCann, S. and Mason, Luke and Mbye, E. and Touray, E. and Ceesay, M. and Moore, S.E. and Lloyd-Fox, S. and Elwell, Clare (2021) Longitudinal infant fNIRS channel-space analyses are robust to variability parameters at the group-level: An image reconstruction investigation. NeuroImage 237, pp. 118068. ISSN 1053-8119.
de Klerk, Carina and Albiston, H. and Bulgarelli, Chiara and Southgate, Victoria and Hamilton, A. (2020) Observing third-party ostracism enhances facial mimicry in 30-month-olds. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 196, pp. 104862. ISSN 0022-0965.

External Repositories

Google Scholar

Business and community

Media

I am happy to receive enquiries from the media on the following topics:

Naturalistic Neuroscience
Social Development (empathy and emotion recognition in toddlers)
fNIRS and other neurotechnologies

Services

Consultancies and expert advice

Support researcher at Gowerlabs Limited, an optical neuroimaging technology company
https://www.gowerlabs.co.uk