We are proud to announce our 9^th and 10^th ADNiR scholars graduated this spring. Declan Alford and Sophie Jeng both joined Dr. Kristen Hoskinson’s research group after their summer rotations in 2024. 

Declan successfully defended an undergraduate thesis, Theory of Mind Task Performance in Critical Heart Disease, on April 30, 2026. This project examined whether critical congenital heart disease (cCHD) affects the theory of mind, or one’s ability to understand social situations and other people’s feelings, in addition to established deficits in other areas of neurocognition like processing speed. He showed that his sample of children with cCHD performed significantly worse on both processing speed and theory of mind tasks, which were positively correlated with each other. This suggests that children who can process information more quickly and accurately may also be better at understanding and responding to social cues. Moreover, he found that children with cCHD performed particularly poorly on the task trials that required cognitive theory of mind relative to control trials, indicating some specificity in this deficit rather than a more general inability to accurately engage in the task. Declan plans to take a gap year to gain direct clinical experience working with hospitalized youth with mental health concerns, and before applying to medical school next year.

Sophie had the distinct honor of presenting a talk in the Pediatric Brain Disorders session at the International Neuropsychological Society Annual Meeting in Philadelphia in February 2026. The title of her talk was Structural Limbic Volume as a Mediator of Behavior Problems in Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury; she found that youth with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury had significantly smaller limbic volume, and that the indirect effect of moderate to severe injury on attention problems via limbic volume better accounted for variability in attention. She also defended an undergraduate thesis, Cross-conditional Compensatory Functional Activation in Default-Mode Network and Salience Network in Executive Functioning, on April 30, 2026. In her thesis, Sophie examined patterns of associations within and across the default mode and salience networks, across several pediatric medical disorders that affect brain function. Sophie will begin a full-time Clinical Research Coordinator position with Dr. Eric Nelson at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in July, applying what she has learned during her time as an ADNiR recipient to a new population of youth with serious mental illness, early-onset psychosis, and substance use disorders. Sophie then plans to apply for graduate school in clinical neuropsychology.

And Dr. Hoskinson is thrilled to spend another year right down the hall (Sophie!) and right across campus (Declan!) from two outstanding lab graduates - congratulations on all you have accomplished!