Our Distinguished Speaker

Dr. MIHAELA IORDANOVA

The Women in Learning team is proud to announce the 2024 distinguished speaker will be Dr. Mihaela Iordanova.

Mihaela is an Associate Professor at Concordia University, a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Behavioural Neuroscience, a 2020 CAN Young Investigator, and a 2016 NARSAD Young Investigator. Her research focuses on delineating the neurobiological mechanisms of learning and memory in fear and reward. 
 
Mihaela began her research career as an honours student in the laboratory of Dr. Frederick Westbrook at the University of New South Wales, where she earned a B.Psych (Hones) and later a Ph.D. She performed her postdoctoral work at Cardiff University where she worked with Drs. Rob Honey, Mark Good, Simon Killcross, Dominic Dwyer, John Aggleton, and John Pearce. She then joined Dr. Schoenbaum at the University of Maryland and NIDA. In 2014, Mihaela commenced an independent position at Concordia University.
 
The work in Mihaela’s lab focuses on studying how the brain learns, how it updates prior knowledge with new information, and how it can make novel inferences about the world on the basis of current knowledge. She accomplishes this by studying the contribution of specific neuronal ensembles to learning, the recruitment of specific neuronal circuits as well as the real-time neural processing of environmental input. Currently, Mihaela’s lab is focused on uncovering the role of the mesolimbic dopamine system in learning to predict upcoming appetitive or aversive events, as well as the corticolimbic circuits involved in memory updating exemplified by behavioral paradigms such as extinction, overexpectation and higher-order conditioning.

Aside from her stellar scientific track record, Mihaela is a wonderful and beloved mentor. We are thrilled to welcome her as our distinguished speaker during this year’s luncheon, held in Indianapolis, IN on September 28, 2024.

For more information about Mihaela and her lab, please visit her lab webpage here.