Please welcome Dr. Sara Burke, Assistant Professor, to Department of Neuroscience

Burke, SaraPlease join us in welcoming Dr. Sara Burke as a tenure-track  Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience. Dr. Burke will be working with the Age Related Memory Loss program (ARML) that is supported by the McKnight Brain Research Foundation.

Previously, Dr. Burke was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Carol Barnes at the University of Arizona. Her work is focused on understanding the mechanisms associated with age-related decline of spatial memory as well as perirhinal cortical-supported object recognition memory. Her work on recognition memory and complex visual perception represents an important cognitive domain that is highly relevant to human aging and that is not currently being explored in existing ARML programs.  In addition, she brings new and technically advanced skills for in vivo characterization of senescent physiology, including recording of cell discharge activity in behaving animals and molecular techniques for cellular compartment analysis of temporal activity by fluorescence in situ hybridization (cat-FISH). These techniques will enhance the investigations in other laboratories of the ARML program, providing great translational potential  and a means for testing the effects of treatments on senescent physiology.