Dr. Sheena A. Josselyn

Canada Research Chair in Molecular and Cellular Cognition

Research Involves: Examining how the brain normally encodes, stores, and retrieves information.

Research Relevance: The research findings will provide new insights into the neural mechanisms that contribute to inherited forms of cognitive disease.

Developing Treatments for Learning and Memory Disorders

Approximately 30 million North Americans suffer from some type of hereditary or acquired learning or memory disorder. Add to that the increase in our elderly population (one in four North Americans is over the age of 50) and you have an increased susceptibility of age related memory declines such as Alzheimer's. Many of these cognitive disorders have no cures or effective treatments.

As the University of Toronto Canada Research Chair in Molecular and Cellular Cognition, Dr. Sheena Josselyn is researching how our brains normally encode, store, and retrieve information, and how these processes may be disrupted in disease states. Her research program takes a multidisciplinary approach, ranging from molecular and cellular neurobiology to behavioural studies, and it includes the examination of cognitive function and dysfunction in human patients. By employing these different approaches, she is able to learn more about the roles of different proteins in normal learning and memory and how they are altered in disease.

With the goal of understanding the basis of cognitive function and dysfunction, Dr. Josselyn's lab examines the building blocks of normal memory and applies these findings to the study of potential treatments for people with learning and memory disorders. She hopes that her study of long term memory and the development of human cognitive disorders will lead to therapeutic treatments for a variety of conditions including Alzheimer's, Rubinstein Taybi syndrome, and Coffin Lowry syndrome.

For further information, please contact Dr. Sheena A. Josselyn using the Email contact form or by phone at 416 813 7654 ext 1824