Jiayi Zheng (Jenny)
Undergraduate RA
Jenny is a final-year BSc Neuroscience and Psychology student at King’s College London, working as a research assistant under the supervision of Dr. Divyangana Rakesh. Her research examines how modifiable environmental and lifestyle factors are associated with children’s cognitive and neurodevelopment, with a particular focus on identifying pathways that support healthy developmental outcomes. She also has a broader interest in how social and cultural contexts shape children’s developmental experiences. Her work primarily uses large-scale secondary datasets, with an emphasis on longitudinal designs and individual differences.
In her first project, Jenny analysed data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study to examine associations between sleep, screen time, and extracurricular activities and multiple cognitive domains, including fluid and crystallised cognition. Using longitudinal data, this work explored how these modifiable lifestyle factors relate to cognitive development over time. The project also examined sex as a potential moderator of these associations. Overall, it highlighted heterogeneity in how everyday behaviours relate to different cognitive domains across development.
Her second project focused on adolescent caffeine consumption and its associations with brain structure, as well as the role of sleep in explaining these relationships. Using ABCD data, Jenny conducted mediation analyses to investigate whether sleep partially explains the links between caffeine intake and neurodevelopmental outcomes, including cortical thickness and surface area. This work aimed to clarify potential behavioural pathways through which common daily exposures may shape adolescent brain development and wellbeing.