Natasha Rajah Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Psychiatry, McGill -

Natasha Rajah is interested in determining which frontal cortex regions exhibit changes in grey matter volume and activity with healthy aging, and how these changes impact our ability to remember details about our past personal experiences. She is also interested in understanding what compensatory mechanisms the aging brain uses to try and maintain memory functions. To answer these questions Natasha Rajah asks healthy young, middle aged and older adults to perform memory experiments while they undergo fMRI scanning to see what brain regions are involved in memory functions.

The goal of this research is to understand how the frontal cortex, in collaboration with other brain regions, work as a neural network and influence learning and memory across the adult lifespan. Ultimately, she wants to understand how the brain changes from young adulthood to old age so she can identify:
- at what age neural and memory changes start to emerge
- how these changes in middle age relate to healthy versus pathological aging
- what the compensatory mechanisms are in the aging brain that help some older adults maintain good memory function.