Rebecca  Brady

Rebecca Brady

MD/PhD Candidate

Rebecca Brady is an MD/PhD candidate in the Medical Scientist Training Program at Washington University in St. Louis. Rebecca is broadly interested in the relationships between prenatal risk factors, early brain development, and later psychiatric symptoms. As part of the WUNDER lab, she is examining how heritable factors & prenatal exposure to neighborhood crime, adversity, and stress influence the connections between emotion processing and emotion regulation regions in babies’ brains at birth. Additionally, Rebecca is using the neonatal neuroimaging data from the longitudinal eLABE study to relate functional and structural brain connectivity to externalizing symptoms and callous-unemotional traits in preschoolers. Her PhD in Neuroscience is funded by a T32 Imaging Sciences Fellowship and a National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Prior to working in the WUNDER lab, Rebecca earned her B.S. at Duke University where she double majored in Philosophy and Neuroscience. Outside of lab, she enjoys yoga, board games, ice skating, and hiking.

Rachel  Butler , BA

Rachel Butler , BA

MD/MPHS Candidate

Rachel Butler is an MD and Master of Population Health Sciences candidate at Washington University in St. Louis. She plans to apply into child neurology residency in 2024. As part of the WUNDER lab, she is studying how prenatal factors including maternal disadvantage and maternal microbiome composition interact and impact structural brain connectivity in children. Rachel earned her B.A. at Washington University where she majored in Comparative Literature with minors in Psychology and Spanish.

Peppar Cyr, MPhil

Peppar Cyr, MPhil

MD/PhD Candidate

Peppar joined the lab in 2018, after completing an AB in Psychology from Princeton University and an MPhil in Clinical Neurosciences from the University of Cambridge (UK). Her thesis project is on using multiple forms of newborn MRI to predict motor outcomes through age 10 in very preterm children (born at least 2.5 months early) with and without brain injury due to their early birth, as funded by her NIH F30 grant. In addition to her research, Peppar is working to make medical education more disability-inclusive, both at WashU and nationally.