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Lisa Saksida Western University, Canada

Lisa Saksida is a Full Professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, a Scientist in the Robarts Research Institute, and a Principal Investigator in the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University in Canada.

She is also Scientific Director of BrainsCAN (Western’s $66M Canada First Research Excellence Fund program in cognitive neuroscience), a Senior Fellow in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and has the privileges of a Fellow Emerita at Newnham College, Cambridge. Lisa 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, but left this after a year to take up a 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 Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the same department. She returned to her native Canada from Cambridge early in 2016.

Lisa’s research focuses on the psychological processes underlying memory and perception, through a programme of theoretically-driven experimental research using several converging methods of enquiry including localised pharmacological methods, transgenic and knock-out mice, and computational modelling. She also has a particular interest in the development of translational methods for cognitive assessment. She is co-inventor of a touchscreen-based cognitive assessment system that allows for comprehensive cognitive phenotyping of rodent models through the assessment of multiple aspects of cognition using tasks that are highly translatable to human patients.