Dr. Sheena Josselyn

Dr. Sheena Josselyn’s five-year plan is simple: “Just keep going for five years!” Her vibrant personality and zest for neuroscience research are contagious, and her interview with Nancy highlights both her brilliance as a scientist and her warm sense of humor as a human being. She explains her early research stint working with rodents as a Ph.D. student and transitioning to clinical populations in her following three(!) postdoctoral experiences at the University of Toronto, Yale, and UCLA. After sampling several subfields of brain research, she found her true calling in studying memory engrams. While she was excited about her work, engrams were themselves a controversial topic in the field. Sheena had to navigate the political side of neuroscience to convince others that studying engrams was a worthwhile endeavor, and her hard work has paid dividends. Her lab is now expanding its focus to explore the memory component of substance abuse, and Sheena continues to forge ahead as a pioneer in her field.