"Mount Sinai Neuroscientist Sheds Light On How The Brain Stores Memories Across A Lifetime"
Denise Cai, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has always been interested in the dynamic nature of memory. But she began to question precisely how the brain can store and recall so many memories over a lifetime while playing a "memory match" card game with her young son. Now, thanks to a major grant from the National Institutes of Health, she'll have the opportunity to explore this question in her lab. Dr. Cai is the winner of a 2019 New Innovator Award. The grant provides $2.5 million over the next five years to support investigation into the ways the brain optimizes its capacity and efficiency for memory storage. "We will use a variety of techniques to observe and manipulate these populations of neurons to determine how the neural activity in the brain controls the animals' behavior," explains Dr. Cai. "Ultimately, we hope to learn how the brain optimizes its capacity to store information across a lifetime. I am tremendously grateful to have received the New Innovator Award, which will enable our lab to explore some fundamental, yet very complex, biological questions in the field of memory and cognition."
— Denise Cai, MD, Assistant Professor, Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Additional coverage: Sleep Review