With the 2025 Flux Congress just around the corner, the Flux Trainee Committee is excited to spotlight some of your fellow attendees through our trainee research profiles. If you’re a trainee—whether a student, post-bacc, or postdoc—and would like to be featured, we invite you to fill out our interest form!
At Flux, we are committed to nurturing the next generation of researchers who are shaping the future of developmental cognitive neuroscience. In our new Trainee Spotlight series, we will highlight the achievements, aspirations, and contributions of outstanding trainees within our community. These young scientists are not only pushing the boundaries of research but also embodying the spirit of collaboration and innovation that drives our field forward.
Today, we are excited to introduce Shaina Brady. Let's dive into their journey, insights, and what motivates them to make a lasting impact in developmental cognitive neuroscience.
Shaina Brady
Graduate Student (PhD)
What is the focus of your research?
My research bridges developmental cognitive neuroscience and public/population health to examine relationships between physiological and cognitive development within the framework of high-stress, resource-poor contexts, both domestically and globally. I explore different forms of universal and context-specific adverse exposures to parse out their mechanistic roles on child physiology, cognition, and health outcomes.
What is your most interesting research finding or inquiry so far?
Under conditions of scarcity and stress, the brain and the body may trade off in their allocation of energy as they exert competing demands for the same metabolic resources. In a cohort of rural South African toddlers, greater acceleration of growth over the first few years of life is linked to poorer developmental skills and to less mature neural functioning at three years. This suggests that in high stress and low-resourced settings, limiting catch-up growth may be adaptive for preserving brain and cognitive development.
What do you enjoy doing when not researching (hobbies, interests, etc)?
I am a classical violinist and enjoy practicing and performing in my spare time. I can also be found experimenting in the kitchen with new ingredients and no recipes.
Best piece of advice you have received as a trainee?
Resilience will always pay off.
Do you have any advice for early-stage trainees?
Never compare yourself to anyone else around you. Everyone has unique needs, skillsets, and trajectories, even if they are at a similar career stage, and success will look very different from one person to the next.
What is the most useful resource that you would recommend to other trainees in developmental cognitive neuroscience?
LinkedIn Learning’s “Complete Guide to R: Wrangling, Visualizing, and Modeling Data” is fantastic for improving data management and graphing skills.
Please list any social media accounts/personal websites that you would like us to highlight.
@shainapbrady.bsky.social
Will you be presenting at the Flux meeting this year in Dublin?
I will be giving a flash talk and presenting a poster on some of my recent work on physical growth and neural activity (mentioned above!), “Brain-Body Tradeoff: Growth Trajectory Predicts Developmental Outcomes and EEG Power in Rural South African Toddlers”.