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Canadian neuroscientist From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sheena Josselyn is a Canadian neuroscientist and a full professor of psychology and physiology at Hospital for Sick Children and The University of Toronto.[1][2] Josselyn studies the neural basis of memory, specifically how the brain forms and stores memories in rodent models.[3] She has made critical contributions to the field of Neuronal Memory Allocation and the study of engrams.[4]
Josselyn was born in Cleveland, Ohio but grew up in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.[5] Josselyn completed her undergraduate education at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Following her undergraduate degree, Josselyn completed a master's degree in clinical psychology under the mentorship of Dr. Rick Beninger.[5] In her Masters, Josselyn published two first author papers, the first studying the modulatory effects of adenosine on dopamine in the striatum[6] and the second on the interaction between neuropeptide Y and antipsychotics in the nucleus accumbens.[7]
Josselyn then moved to Toronto to complete her PhD in psychology and neuroscience at the University of Toronto.[5] Under the mentorship of Dr. Franco Vaccarino, Josselyn studied the effects of CCKB and CCKA modulation on associative learning and published multiple first author papers.[8][9][10] Following her PhD, Josselyn completed her postdoctoral work at Yale University in New Haven under the mentorship of Dr. Mike Davis.[11] Shortly after, she moved to LA to complete another postdoc under the mentorship of Dr. Alcino J. Silva at the University of California Los Angeles.[5] Josselyn helped discover the importance of CREB in memory formation and retrieval[12] which led to probing the molecular mechanisms and biological purpose of forgetting.[13]
After finishing her postdoctoral work, Josselyn moved back to Toronto to start her lab at SickKids Hospital at the University of Toronto.[5] Her overall goal is to understand how humans learn and remember such that one day her work can impact translational research at her institute and in her community.[5] Some of Josselyn's early discoveries include discovering that CREB over-expression in the auditory thalamus increases memory and fear,[14] and further, that ablating neurons that highly expressed CREB after fear learning actually ablates fear memories in rodent.[15] These were some of the first findings isolating specific neurons representing a specific memory in the brain.[3][15] Josselyn's multidisciplinary approach to tackling questions regarding memories led her to several prestigious awards and recognitions including becoming a member of the Royal Society of Canada in 2018 for her research.[16]
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