Kevin M. Cook, Ph.D., is research faculty at the Developing Brain Institute at Children’s National Hospital and assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the George Washington University. Dr. Cook is broadly interested in exploring how factors during the prenatal and early neonatal period influence brain development and neurodevelopment outcomes later into childhood.
Dr. Cook’s academic and research training has focused on the intersecting areas of cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging, and psychiatry. His predoctoral training focused on social and emotional processes in young adults, with an emphasis on the use of neuroimaging in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as well as schizophrenia to explore common neural correlates of atypical socio-emotional processing. His subsequent doctoral training at Georgetown University concentrated his focus on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with children with ASD. At Georgetown, his work was focused on exploring hippocampal connectivity at rest and activation while engaging in flexible cognition.
Dr. Cook subsequently joined the Developing Brain Institute in 2020 to extend his research training into the use of fMRI in the novel and technically challenging field of perinatal neuroimaging. Since joining the institute, he has explored early differences in functional brain connectivity of in utero fetuses as well as differences in brain development of infants born very and extremely preterm during both the preterm period as well as at term equivalent age. Most recently, he has focused on early life experiences and other risk factors for later neurodevelopment concerns including developmental delays and risk for neurodevelopmental disorders such as ASD.
