Denise Cai

Education and early career

Cai attended the University of California, San Diego, where she received her Bachelor of Science in psychology in 2004. There, she performed an honors thesis under the mentorship of Ebbe Ebbesen entitled "Computational model of rape and assault cases." She continued her education at UCSD, pursuing her doctoral degree in Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience, working with advisors Sara Mednick, Stephan Anagnostaras, and Michael Gorman.[1] Her graduate work focused on how sleep affects memory formation in humans and in mice. In humans, she found that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep facilitates creative thinking, compared to quiet rest and non-REM sleep.[2] Specifically, she found that REM sleep enhances the integration of unassociated memories and is associated with processes of abstraction and generalization that facilitate problem solving and discovery.[3]

Cai received her Ph.D. in 2010 and then moved to the University of California, Los Angeles for a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratories of Alcino J. Silva and Peyman Golshani. She pursued this work with the support of a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health.[4]

Research

In 2017, Cai became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. There, her research program centers on investigating memory formation.

Awards and honors

References
  1. Cai, Denise Jade (2010). Evidence for sleep-dependent memory consolidation in human and mice (Thesis). UC San Diego.
  2. Cai, Denise J.; Mednick, Sarnoff A.; Harrison, Elizabeth M.; Kanady, Jennifer C.; Mednick, Sara C. (2009-06-23). "REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 106 (25): 10130–10134. doi:10.1073/pnas.0900271106. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 2700890. PMID 19506253.
  3. Monaghan, Padraic. "What is going on in your brain when you sleep?". The Conversation. Retrieved 2020-03-08.
  4. "Project Information - NIH RePORTER - NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Results". projectreporter.nih.gov. Retrieved 2020-03-08.
  5. "Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Announces Recipients of Nation's First Gender Equity Grants". finance.yahoo.com. Retrieved 2020-03-08.
  6. "New Innovator Award Recipients". commonfund.nih.gov. Retrieved 2020-03-08.
  7. "Project Information - NIH RePORTER - NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Results". projectreporter.nih.gov. Retrieved 2020-03-08.
  8. "Five Brain Science Leaders Announced as 2019 One Mind Rising Star Award Winners". www.businesswire.com. 2019-09-03. Retrieved 2020-03-08.
  9. "The Esther A. & and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, Inc". www.klingfund.org. Retrieved 2020-03-08.
  10. "Next Generation Leaders". alleninstitute.org. Retrieved 2020-03-08.
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