Dr Stolp’s research aims to understand the pathophysiology of neurodevelopmental injury, and to utilize this knowledge to target therapeutic and diagnostic tools. Her work has focused on the role of inflammation in normal and pathological neurodevelopment. Her recent work is focused on the perinatal response to inflammation, and has identified a novel alteration in cortical development following inflammation. Such discoveries have relevance for our understanding of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and cerebral palsy. She is pursuing novel therapies to ameliorate these injuries.

In addition, Dr Stolp is working with a team of MRI experts and neonatologists to establish a new technology for linking microstructural neuropathology with state of the art MR imaging. They have devised a method, termed 3D-BOND, whereby diffusion MRI and 3D histology-based data sets generated from the same brain can be co-registered to produce voxel-wise comparison, which can be used to both explore the basic biological underpinnings of MRI and develop disease targeted biomarkers.