Caroline Hartley

Caroline's research explores early life brain development, with a focus on the development of pain processing. As infants cannot talk, assessing when they are in pain, and identifying the best analgesics for use in infants is challenging. Caroline develops approaches to analyse brain activity and physiological data, such as heart rate and oxygen saturation, in infants, and has recently demonstrated that noxious-evoked brain activity recorded using EEG is sensitive to analgesic modulation. Using multimodal approaches to assess analgesic efficacy and measure pain responses will improve our understanding of brain development and lead to better pain management in the infant population.

Caroline completed her undergraduate degree in Mathematics at the University of Warwick in 2008. She then joined the Centre for Mathematics and Physics in the Life Sciences and Experimental Biology (CoMPLEX), University College London, first undertaking a Master?s degree in Mathematical Biology before carrying on to do a PhD. Her PhD research examined brain development in preterm babies, looking at EEG recordings and using computational neural network models to explore how neuronal connections form in the developing brain.