Professor Topun Austin
Consultant Neonatologist at Rosie Hospital and Director of Evelyn Perinatal Imaging Centre (EPIC)
Affiliations: Rosie Hospital, CUH
Professor Austin leads the Evelyn Perinatal Imaging Centre (EPIC), based at the Rosie Hospital, Cambridge. The centre has a dedicated infant functional brain imaging unit and also houses a 1.5T MRI scanner for mothers and babies. The research interests of the group are in the development of monitoring and imaging technologies to identify vulnerable infants at an early stage.
neoLAB is a formal collaborative group between EPIC and Biomedical Optics Laboratory at UCL. The group has been involved in developing an integrated optical-EEG system to study neurovascular coupling as well as a unique fast optical tomography system for 3D imaging of regional blood flow and oxygenation.
Professor Austin is a collaborator on the Cambridge Human Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) Study which is using MRI both prenatally and neonatally with in pregnancies where the mother or the baby’s sibling has a diagnosis of autism, and following up these babies in toddlerhood. He is also a collaborator on the Cambridge Ultrasound Siblings and Parents (CUSP) Study using ultrasound during these pregnancies to chart growth of the infant prenatally.
Collaborators on these studies are Dr Gerald Hackett, Dr Rosie Holt, Ezra Aydin, Dr Shimrit Ziv, Dr Amber Ruigrok, Professor John Suckling, and Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, and these studies are funded by the Autism Research Trust.