Welcome Dr. Kathryn Manning

We would like to welcome Dr. Kathryn Manning (Assistant Professor, Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto), to the CPIN Program. Dr. Manning is a Scientist in the Neurosciences & Mental Health and Translational Medicine programs at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. With a background in applied mathematics and physics, she obtained her MSc and PhD in the Department of Medical Biophysics at Western University with Dr. Ravi Menon. Through her graduate work she demonstrated neuroplastic reorganization in children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy treated with constraint-induced movement therapy and developed elegant data-driven analyses techniques to understand the acute and persistent brain changes associated with concussion. She completed her postdoctoral work with Dr. Catherine Lebel at the Alberta Children’s Hospital scanning infants and young children to understand early brain development patterns, focused on how they are shaped by prenatal maternal distress and how they support different outcomes. She demonstrated for the first time how social support can not only support better mental health for pregnant individuals - it can mediate the impact on the infant functional connectome. In her recent work, she has taken advantage of open, big-data to understand how the complex balance of risk and resiliency factors can impact individual developmental trajectories, uncovering specific multidimensional brain patterns that predict mental health outcomes. Dr. Manning is currently exploring how targeted interventions can capitalize upon the plastic potential of the young brain, exploring how advanced image analyses can predict and quantify treatment-induced brain changes.