Five minutes with 2010 Honours scholarship recipient:
Emma Ho
1. What was the purpose of your Honours project?
The long-term goal of my research was to develop new ways of diagnosing and treating the motor and cognitive dysfunction experienced by preterm children.
Research has shown that babies who are born prematurely are more likely to suffer subtle deficits in brain function than babies who are carried to term, which can have a long-term impact on their language, problem-solving and coordination abilities. We know that the motor system plays a pivotal role in language perception and development: understanding this relationship, and developing therapies which aim to improve motor cortex excitability, may improve the language deficits experienced by preterm children.
It is my hope that my research study will give rise to greater awareness of the learning difficulties experienced by preterm children, and that it may, down the track, support improved academic and social outcomes for these children at school and beyond.
2. What inspired your interest in the neuromotor development of children?
The field of neuroanatomy has always interested me. My brother was born prematurely and has dyslexia: I found the idea of investigating the neurological conditions of childhood to be very interesting on a personal and scientific level.
My project evolved from Dr Julia Pitcher's original, ongoing research called the PREMOCODE study. Using a large cohort of children of varying gestational ages, the study has found a strong association between the development of the motor cortex and cognitive ability. This lead to my own hypothesis and experiment. I also loved the fact that I got to interact with new families and children on a daily basis!
3. What was the best thing about working at the Children's Research Centre?
One of the best things about working at the Children's Research Centre was the children themselves: I acquired interpersonal skills that I could not have gained in many other educational environments.
In addition, I greatly benefited from being exposed to experienced PhD students and successful, established researchers who worked within the Children's Research Centre. Dr Julia Pitcher was an excellent person to work with and helped guide me through my Honours year with confidence.
I also loved the fact that I was able to learn a technique called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and conduct fascinating brain experiments in a "hands-on" environment. My project was the first to assess the timing of motor cortex facilitation during speech listening in both adults and children using TMS, and this was the highlight of my Honours year.
4. What was your chosen methodology?
In order to monitor the changes in motor cortex excitability, I applied Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) during speech-listening tasks. TMS is a painless way of stimulating underlying cortical tissue: during the application of TMS to the brain, we measured and recorded the response in hand muscles using electrodes. These responses from the muscles are called "motor evoked potentials" and are representative of the motor cortex excitability in the brain. It is through this technique that we were able to measure the behaviour of the cortical pathways in response to different sounds and words.
My protocol required children to listen to 120 ‘sounds', including adjectives, hand-action words, signal-correlated noise (white noise which has the same profile as a word) and periods of silence. Once I assessed each participant's baseline cortical excitability, I applied TMS for each word at both 500ms and 1000ms after the onset of the word, and completed the speech-listening task with an assessment of both hemispheres of the brain. I completed this protocol in over 30 adults and children.
5. What are your career ambitions for the future?
My long-term ambition is to study medicine and become a surgeon. However, in the short-term, I am looking forward to pursuing a career in child health and am currently thinking about employment in audiology, speech pathology or psychology. At some point I would like to apply my skills in the non-profit sector and gain health-service experience in rural Australia. Alternatively, I am keen to travel overseas at some point and provide medical assistance to third-world communities as part of the ‘doctors without borders' scheme.
