She received her doctorate in Nursing from UNC while completing a research fellowship at the National Institute of Environmental Sciences at NIH. Her research interests relate to the interaction of immune responses during development with neurocognitive outcomes of prematurely born infants. She has developed a mouse model for exposure of the perinatal brain to an inflammatory mediator. Dr. Brunssen has experience with behavioral testing of early post-natal through adult mice using measures of physical, reflex, sensorimotor, emotional, and cognitive functions, including coding of behavioral observations. Dr. Brunssen’s current work integrates molecular and structural methods (microarray and protein expression) with behavioral outcomes to examine mechanisms altering neurocognitive development.