Sharna Jamadar

Monash Biomedical Imaging Deputy Node Director

Sharna Jamadar is Associate Professor (Research) and NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellow at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health & Monash Biomedical Imaging.

Sharna leads the Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab. Her research is focused on understanding how our life experiences change our brains, and how this may confer resilience to the ageing process.  She is particularly interested in developing and applying novel imaging methods to study brain connectivity and its change across the lifespan. In addition, Sharna also has an emerging interest in the neuroscience of parenthood, and her team has proposed the new hypothesis that parenthood contributes to cognitive reserve and resilience to the ageing process. Sharna is an expert in multimodal neuroimaging, and uses a number of imaging techniques to understand cognitive control, including positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG) and oculomotor measures (eye-tracking) to study the brain.

At Monash Biomedical Imaging, Sharna’s team leads the development of simultaneous functional PET/MR imaging in humans at the facility. Sharna and her team has developed novel PET/MR measures that provide high resolution mapping of the function, structure, and metabolic efficiency of the brain. For the first time, these new techniques allow researchers to study task-related changes in brain function and metabolism with a temporal resolution below 20sec. This work will have substantial implications for our understanding of how the brain dynamically uses energy; and Sharna will use these new methods to understand how the metabolic efficiency of the brain changes across the lifespan.