Dr. M. Natasha Rajah received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Toronto in 2003 and did her post-doctoral training at U.C. Berkeley, 2003-2005. She joined the Douglas Institute in 2005 as Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychiatry. She has been awarded several awards and honours including: the CIHR New Investigator Salary Award (2007-2012), FRQ-S Junior 2 Research Scholar Award in (2012-2016), Haile T. Debas Prize (2019), and CIHR Chair in Sex & Gender Research in Neuroscience, Mental Health and Addiction (2020-2024). She served as the inaugural Director of the Douglas Brain Imaging Centre (BIC)  from July 2011-December 2020. 

She currently serves as Chair of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) at the Douglas Research Centre; Co-Chair of EDI and The Chair of Memberships at the Canadian Consortium for Neurodegeneration and Aging (CCNA); Board of Directors of the Canadian Association of Neuroscience (CAN), and Board of Advisors for the Women in Cognitive Science Society Canada (WiCSC).  She is a Senior Editor at Brain Research, Associate Editor at Psychological Science and Editor-in-Chief at Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition.

Dr. Rajah’s lab conducts sex and gender research in the cognitive neuroscience of memory, ageing and dementia prevention. The goals of our research program are to identify the biological, environmental, and societal factors that support the maintenance of normative memory and brain function in women and men from diverse backgrounds across the adult lifespan, and determine what factors lead to more women than men developing late-onset sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease (AD).