Dr. Lisa Saksida
Affiliation
Co-Scientific Director of Western’s Canada First Research Excellence Fund program in cognitive neuroscience
Committee membership
Standing Committee on Science
Biography
Dr Lisa Saksida is the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Translational Cognitive Neuroscience and is Co-Scientific Director of Western’s Canada First Research Excellence Fund program in cognitive neuroscience. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Dr Saksida has the privileges of a Fellow Emerita at Newnham College, Cambridge, in recognition of distinguished contributions to the education, learning, research or governance of the College for 15 years, and in 2020 was selected as one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women by the Women’s Executive Network, in recognition of her mentorship of other women.
Dr Saksida completed an interdisciplinary PhD at the Centre for the Neural Basis of Cognition and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 1999. She then held a Fogarty Fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health in the US, followed by the Pinsent Darwin Research Associateship at the University of Cambridge. She was appointed to a lectureship in the Department of Psychology in Cambridge in 2001, eventually making her way to Full Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the same department. She returned to Canada from Cambridge early in 2016.
Dr Saksida has made important theoretical and experimental contributions to understanding the neurobiological basis of cognition. Her collaborative and interdisciplinary approach allows her to span multiple levels of analysis—from molecule to behaviour—to answer fundamental questions about the brain in health and disease, and how the answers to these questions can best be translated to the clinic. She has published over 160 papers in these domains in high impact journals, which have been cited over 16,000 times.
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