Topun Austin

I am a Consultant Neonatologist at Cambridge University Hospitals, Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge and Honorary Professor of Neurophotonics at University College London. I have a longstanding interest in perinatal brain injury, behaviour and neural networks and development of new technologies to monitor and image the developing brain to identify vulnerable infants at an early stage. 

I am the director of neoLAB, based in the Evelyn Perinatal Imaging Centre (EPIC) at the Rosie Hospital, Cambridge. The research themes of the group are around cerebrovascular regulation and neurovascular coupling in preterm and sick newborn infants at risk of acute brain injury and on mother and infant mental health through the application of new technologies to investigate functional brain activity and neural synchrony to better understand the role of social cognition, sleep and consciousness in the developing brain. 

I am the lead for the Rosie NeuroNICU, developing a brain-orientated model of care for newborn infants in intensive care and have been a member of a number of British Association of Perinatal Medicine (BAPM) working groups developing frameworks for practice for therapeutic hypothermia and neonatal MRI. I am a senior member of Robinson College Cambridge where I supervise undergraduate students in neuroanatomy. 

I have a longstanding collaboration with the Biomedical Optics Laboratory at UCL who have pioneered a number of new optical technologies to image the newborn brain and with Physics for Medicine, INSERM, Paris, France. I also have longstanding local collaborations with the Department of Clinical Neuroscience (Prof. Marek Cszonyka), Psychology (Prof. Mark Johnson) and Psychiatry (Prof. Sir Simon Baron-Cohen). 

I am a visiting fellow at the Nanyang Technology University in Singapore where I am collaborating with Professor Vicky Leong on studies investigating mother-infant neural synchrony and early infant development as part of the Cambridge-Singapore Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualised Cognition (CLIC).

Project/study information

The fUSiON (fast Ultrasound integrated with Optics in the Newborn) is a collaborative study between Cambridge and Paris to develop a portable cot-side functional brain imaging system combining the relatively new technologies of fast ultrasound and diffuse optical tomography. Further details of the study can be found at neoLab