Dr Julia Sacher (Max Planck Institute, Germany) is visiting our Center on April 19th and we are organizing a Seminar for MGH-MGB Faculty at 1pm. Dr Sacher is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroendocrinology with the Medical Faculty of the University Clinic of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Human Brain Sciences.
The event will be at CNY Room (2.204) and online. It would be a wonderful opportunity for many and we wanted to share her perspectives and experience.
Seminar Details:
Topic: “A focus on hormonal transitions across the female lifespan: Implications for Brain Health and Individual Ageing Trajectories"
Date: Friday, April 19th
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM EST
Location: CNY Brain Map room (2.204) and over zoom
Guest Speaker: Dr. Julia Sacher
Should you have any questions or require further information, please do not hesitate to contact me (jherve@mgh.harvard.edu). We are looking forward to seeing many of you there.
Guest Speaker Biography: Dr. Julia Sacher is a professor of Cognitive Neuroendocrinology with the Medical Faculty of the University Clinic of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Human Brain Sciences. She is also a faculty member of the Max Planck School of Cognition (https://cognition.maxplanckschools.org/en), the International Max Planck Research School of Cognitive Neuroimaging, and the Berlin School of Mind & Brain.
Dr. Sacher’s original training is as a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist. She obtained her MD-degree in Vienna. Her PhD in neuroscience (Medical University Vienna, Austria) was followed by a postdoctoral clinical and research fellowship at the Centre for Addiction & Mental Health (CAMH), University of Toronto, research stays at University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University (funded by the NIH), and CDI (Career Development Institute for Mental Health Research) training at the University of Pittsburgh and Stanford University, funded by the NIH. Dr. Sacher is a distinguished university scholar and has held several prestigious Awards and Fellowships, such as the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, the Brain and Behavior Young Investigator Award (2x), the CINP Rafaelsen Award, and the Branco Weiss Fellowship at the Society in Science (ETH, Zurich). She is a full member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmaoclogy (ACNP) and serves on advisory boards, editorial boards, and peer review panels internationally and nationally, including CAMH’s Womenmind Seed Funding Competition. Dr. Sacher drives initiatives in women's health research by advocating precision-imaging for hormonal transitions like the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause, and encourages the integration of sex and gender-based analyses in neuroscience to uplift mental health for both women and men.
Dr. Sacher’s discoveries include:
--first evidence for neurochemical changes in humans during major hormonal transition phases, such as increases of MAO-A in early postpartum, perimenopause and postpartum depression (Arch Gen Psch/JAMA Psych 2010, 2011; Neuropsychopharmacology, 2015),
--serotonin transporter dynamics in premenstrual dysphoric disorder (Biol Psychiatry 2023)
--proof of concept for dense sampling of ovarian hormones and human brain architecture including first human evidence of hippocampal subfield dynamics using high-field 7T MRI (Front Neurosci 2015; Nature Mental Health 2023)
--pioneering sex as a discovery variable in multimodal large neuroimaging data-banks, such as in the relationship between obesity, brain health and cognitive performance across the life-span (JAMA Netw Open 2019)
--first evidence for association between maternal mood postpartum and infant language development (JAMA Netw Open 2021)
--prioritizing diversity, sex, and gender in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) for big multi-organ MR data-bases, such as the UK Biobank and the Human Connectome Project (Science 2023)
