Lisa Saksida
Professor, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Translational Cognitive Neuroscience, Co-Scientific Director, BrainsCAN
Post-Doctoral Fellowship – Laboratory of Neuropsychology, NIH
Ph.D. – Carnegie Mellon
M.Sc. – University of British Columbia, University of Edinburgh
BSc. – University of Western Ontario
Office: WIRB 6th floor/Robarts Research Institute 3228</br />
p. 519.661.3604 x. 83604/
519.931.5777 x. 83604
e. lsaksida@uwo.ca
Websites: https://tcnlab.ca https://touchscreencognition.org https://mousetrapplatform.org
Why Science?
Although I have always found aspects of science to be fascinating, I am not one of these people who knew from an early age that they were going to be a scientist. I first had a glimmer of this as a possibility when I was in the second year of my BSc at Western. I had a summer job working for Bell telephone that consisted of taking phone calls all day long from installers in the field, who gave me detailed information about the lines that they had installed. I had to be quick and accurate, which required me to memorize long lists of code numbers and other highly specific information. It required quite a bit of brain power, but it was absurdly dull. I found myself living for cheese toast on my coffee breaks, which was not a good development. So I remember sitting there and thinking that instead of using my brain for this, perhaps a better option would be to use it for something interesting and meaningful, that had the potential to make a positive impact on society rather than toward a corporate bottom line. I was fortunate to win an NSERC summer studentship in the Department of Psychology the next summer. My supervisors, Peter Ossenkopp and Martin Kavaliers, were unbelievably supportive and enthusiastic, and that experience really fueled my enthusiasm for science.
Although this had sparked a potential interest in science as a future direction, I still really had no idea what I wanted to do. I wound up deciding to pursue a Master’s degree in Biopsychology at UBC, in part because I thought Vancouver sounded like a fun place to live. While there, I studied spatial navigation in pigeons. My experiments involved showing the pigeons images of scenes on touchscreens, which they pecked to interact with, and I tried to work out how they were solving these difficult tasks. I enjoyed that project a lot too, and was all set up to continue to a PhD, when I went to a public lecture by a philosopher named Patricia Churchland on “The Computational Brain”. Her talk blew my mind, and for the first time I thought, this is what I must do. The only problem was that although I knew a bit about the brain, I had almost no background in computation.
I managed to find a taught Master’s course at the University of Edinburgh in artificial intelligence and robotics, that was geared toward students with a lack of computational training. This launched me to a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, where I worked on a project that combined my psychology training with my new computational skills. I then went on to a post doc at the National Institutes of Health in the US, where I combined computational models with neuroscience experiments (but dropped the robotics), then to a faculty position at the University of Cambridge in the UK, and now am back at Western—25+ years later—as a Canada Research Chair.
Research Goals
My overarching research goal is to understand brain circuits and mechanisms underlying cognition in the healthy brain and in disease. The circuits that I focus on are those most often implicated in a range of disorders that are of immense relevance to society today, including Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. My team’s work involves theoretically rigorous, mechanistic studies of cognition in disease models, using pharmacological, genetic and molecular manipulations along with sophisticated analysis of cognition and behaviour. Using these methods, we investigate fundamental questions about the neurobiological underpinnings of cognition, and how the answers to these questions can best be translated to treatments for patients.
Specific Research Interests
My specific research interests are very broad, but all centre on measuring and evaluating cognition in innovative and precise ways that are relevant to improving human health. One platform for doing this is a cognitive assessment system using touchscreen technology (my early pigeon experience came in handy!) in mouse models that I co-invented with Tim Bussey. The touchscreen system is now being used in hundreds of institutions worldwide. More recently, we have paired touchscreen-based tests of cognition in mice with cutting-edge technologies to record or manipulate neuronal, glial or neurochemical activity, making it possible to match—millisecond by millisecond—what is happening in the brain with human-relevant cognition. To further increase impact, we have created mousebytes.ca, the first open-access database and repository for structured cognitive data obtained in mice where raw data can be stored, shared, combined and reanalyzed to extract more from the data, and complete information about these tools has been made openly accessible to researchers worldwide via touchscreencognition.org. This ecosystem forms the basis of the Mouse Translational Research Accelerator Platform (MouseTRAP). A $24M New Frontiers in Research Fund project centred around using this platform to improve drug evaluation pipelines was announced in April 2023.
Undergraduate Teaching:
Interdisciplinary Medical Sciences MSc program, lab rotations
Neuroscience 4000, Honours Thesis
Physiology and Pharmacology 4980, Honours Thesis
Neuroscience 3000
Most Rewarding Moments
The main goal that I have is to have a positive impact on the world, which can be manifested in various ways. This includes seeing my trainees flourish and for me, good science is primarily about the team and the people. I also love the intellectual puzzle of research, which includes communication across different knowledge bases. I think that many breakthroughs happen at the interfaces between fields, and I enjoy bringing together people with exceptional but very different skillsets, and facilitating working together to answer the most challenging questions.
Advice to Students
My advice to students is that things that at first appear to be failures are an unavoidable part of science (and life), and are valuable as they can lead to tremendous personal growth. By flipping failures and understanding how to learn from them, you build skills and resilience. It is also important to keep in mind that science does not have to define you, and it is critical to find balance outside of the lab.
Interests Outside of Academia
Outside of the lab I try to prioritize yoga, biking, and spending time with my family. I am a beginner potter, which I am simultaneously obsessed with and frustrated with in equal measure.
Awards and Recognitions:
Please provide a list of all your awards and recognitions
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC)
Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (CAHS)
Women’s Executive Network Canada’s Top 100 Women Award, Manulife Science and Technology Category, 2020
Privileges of Fellow Emerita, Newnham College Cambridge
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Fellow, Program in Brain, Mind and Consciousness, 2014-2023
Elected Member of the Memory Disorders Research Society (MDRS), 2008 – present
Highlighted Publications:
Lopez-Cruz, L., Phillips, B.U., Hailwood, J.M., Saksida, L.M., Heath, C.J., Bussey, T.J. (2024) Refining the study of decision-making in animals: Differential effects of d-amphetamine and haloperidol in a novel touchscreen-automated Rearing-Effort Discounting (RED) task and the Fixed-Ratio Effort Discounting (FRED) task. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2024 Jan;49(2):422-432. doi: 10.1038/s41386-023-01707-z. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01707-z
Sullivan, J.A., Dumont, J.R., Memar, S., Skirzewski, M., Wan, J., Mofrad, M.H., Ansari, H.Z., Li, Y., Muller, L., Prado, V.F., Prado, M.A.M., Saksida, L.M., Bussey, T.J. (2021) New frontiers in translational research: Touchscreens, open science, and The Mouse Translational Research Accelerator Platform (MouseTRAP). Genes Brains and Behavior. (2021) 20(1):e12705. doi: 10.1111/gbb.12705 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gbb.12705 Wiley “Top Cited Article 2020-2021” and “Top Cited Article 2021-2022”.
Nithianantharajah J, McKechanie AG, Stewart TJ, Johnstone M, Blackwood DH, St Clair D, Grant SG, Bussey TJ, Saksida LM. (2015). Bridging the translational divide: identical cognitive touchscreen testing in mice and humans carrying mutations in a disease-relevant homologous gene. Scientific Reports. 2015 Oct 1;5:14613. doi:10.1038/srep14613. PubMed PMID: 26423861. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4589696/pdf/srep14613.pdf
Romberg, C., McTighe, S.M., Heath, C.J., Whitcomb, D., Cho, K., Bussey, T.J. & Saksida, L.M. (2012) False recognition in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease: rescue with sensory restriction and memantine. Brain, 135:2103-2114. doi:10.1093/brain/aws074 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3381719/pdf/aws074.pdf
