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Professor James Boardman
In the Augustine United Church
41 George IV Bridge
Edinburgh,
EH1 1EL
On Monday 24th November 2025, at 7pm
Globally, around 15 million babies are born preterm (less than 37 weeks’ gestation) each year. Professor Boardman will discuss how preterm birth impacts development and health across the life course. He will describe how knowledge gained from population-level epidemiological studies and detailed studies of premature babies using state-of-the-art neuroimaging and experimental medicine approaches is transforming understanding about how early birth shapes human brain development, and how this understanding paves the way for developing new treatments to help children born too soon or too small get the best start in life.
James Boardman is a professor of neonatal medicine and director of the Jennifer Brown Research Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. His research investigates new ways of reducing brain injury and restoring learning potential after adverse early life events. His significant contributions include characterising atypical brain development after preterm birth using quantitative MRI, elucidating how the perinatal stress environment and systemic inflammation interact with brain development, and mapping the effect of socioeconomic gradients on brain growth. His current work seeks to understand which perinatal exposures confer risk and resilience for neurodevelopmental and educational outcomes in children born preterm and to identify the biological axes that embed those exposures in child development. Boardman is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a past president of the Neonatal Society, holds a UKRI MRC programme grant and is the editor of Avery and MacDonald’s Neonatology, an internationally leading text on pathophysiology and management of the newborn.