Peppar Cyr

Program: Neurosciences

Current advisor: Christopher D. Smyser, MD

Undergraduate university: Princeton University, 2015

Enrollment year: 2016

Research summary
Individual Motor Outcome Prediction in Very Preterm Children With and Without Brain Injury Using Neonatal Functional Neuroimaging

People born too early grow up to have a wide range of motor abilities – including typical development, developmental coordination disorder (DCD), and the full range of cerebral palsy (CP; able to walk independently, able walk with mobility aids, unable to walk) – but it is difficult to tell early on how a child will develop, and children with mild disabilities are often missed until they have struggled for many years. People with all of these motor disabilities have lower quality of life than those without as both children and adults, because of chronic pain, discrimination and bullying, and difficulty interacting with inaccessible places, objects, and systems. How much each of these factors matter for a person and what is the best way to improve their quality of life can differ by how severe their disability is. For example, someone with CP who uses a wheelchair full-time and has little use of their hands is more likely to have chronic pain and to benefit from learning how to use an adapted power wheelchair early in life than someone with DCD. However, that person with DCD is more likely to struggle as teachers try to hold them to the same handwriting speed and readability standards as their nondisabled peers and might benefit from being allowed to type instead. Both people might appreciate meeting others like them, to learn from lived experience and feel less alone.

My research aims to allow doctors to better predict what infants’ motor abilities will be like as they grow up. This would allow them to help families to set appropriate expectations for their child, to access therapies and equipment with goals matched to a child’s expected development, to participate in adaptive activities, and to find disabled peers and community sooner. To do this, I am building statistical models to determine what measures of infant brain activity best relate to scores on standardized movement tests at ages 2, 5, and 10 years old in a group of children born at least 2.5 months early. We expect that different patterns of activity in the parts of the brain involved in movement (motor cortex, thalamus, basal ganglia, and cerebellum) will relate to motor outcomes in children who did and did not have bleeding in their brains as infants.

Graduate publications
Cyr PEP, Lean RE, Kenley JK, Kaplan S, Meyer DE, Neil JJ, Alexopoulos D, Brady RG, Shimony JS, Rodebaugh TL, Rogers CE, Smyser CD. 2022 Neonatal motor functional connectivity and motor outcomes at age two years in very preterm children with and without high-grade brain injury. Neuroimage Clin, 36():103260.

Brenner RG, Smyser CD, Lean RE, Kenley JK, Smyser TA, Cyr PEP, Shimony JS, Barch DM, Rogers CE. 2021 Microstructure of the Dorsal Anterior Cingulum Bundle in Very Preterm Neonates Predicts the Preterm Behavioral Phenotype at 5 Years of Age. Biol Psychiatry, 89(5):433-42.