Baycrest

Three Baycrest scientists who personify Excellence in Research Baycrest is privileged to be the academic home for some of the greatest minds in cognitive neuroscience, according to Dr. William Reichman, president and chief executive officer of Baycrest. We present three of these high achievers: Dr. Cheryl Grady Dr. morris moscovitch Dr. jennifer ryan Senior Scientist, Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Canada Research Chair in Neurocognitive Aging, University of Toronto Senior Scientist, Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Max and Gianna Glassman Chair in Neuropsychology and Aging, University of Toronto Senior Scientist, Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory, University of Toronto In 2010, Dr. Cheryl Grady continued Baycrest's tradition of excellence in research. The main focus of her current work is "cognitive aging" — specifically, how aging affects brain activity during cognitive tasks and how these differences may affect behaviour. Over the past 14 years, Dr. Grady's research has spanned many areas — from how our ability to recall faces changes with aging to how neural networks function across time. A recent interest is the variability of brain activity and how this is affected by aging. "We hope our findings will allow us to design better methods of rehabilitation by identifying the brain mechanisms underlying behavioural difficulties in older adults," says Dr. Grady. In 2010, one of Dr. Grady's papers, reporting on a project exploring large-scale brain network activity in older adults, won the Donald T. Stuss Award for Research Excellence. When Dr. Morris Moscovitch first started doing research at Baycrest in the late 1980s, the Rotman Research Institute didn't exist. "The early days were challenging," he recalls. "But we had great leaders like Dr. Don Stuss and Dr. Morris Freedman who were eventually able to attract excellent scientists to join us. With the support of Joe Rotman and Baycrest, we soon had the feeling that we were actually leading the field." Over the past 25 years, Dr. Moscovitch has built an impressive body of research in the areas of memory, attention and face recognition. He currently heads the University of Toronto's Human Neuropsychology and Cognitive Science Lab where scientists study neurologically normal people and those with brain damage related to stroke, head injury and Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Moscovitch is known specifically for his work on the frontal lobes and a brain structure called the hippocampus which is likely involved in memory and attention. He currently sits on the editorial boards of prominent research journals including Neuropsychologia, Cortex, Cognitive Neuropsychology, and Brain Research. Dr. Jennifer Ryan is studying memory performance in younger and older adults, using specialized equipment to track eye movements. While others have studied eye movement to examine attention, Dr. Ryan believes she and her colleagues are the first to use it as a tool to explore memory. "Eye-movement monitoring is based on the idea that our eyes are attracted to areas of the environment that have changed," she explains. "This allows us to look at which regions of the brain are 'on' while the subject is asked to think about or remember something. We can then associate different kinds of memory and certain areas of the brain." Studying how memory systems break down may improve our understanding of how memory is organized more generally and lead to better methods for helping people with memory deficits due to aging, injury and illnesses, she explains. research.baycrest.org/annualreport 21

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