Brief Biography
Dr. Sonia Lupien is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress at the Douglas Hospital in Montreal, Canada, and is a scientist affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University. She received her undergraduate education in psychology (B.Sc.), neuropsychology ( M.Sc.) and neurosciences (Ph.D.) at the University of Montreal, and she completed post-doctoral research training at the University of California in San Diego and at Rockefeller University in New York. She leads the Laboratory of Human Stress Research that specializes in measuring the acute and chronic impact of stress hormones on learning and memory in human populations. In 1998, Sonia Lupien found that high levels of stress hormones in older adults are linked to both memory impairments and atrophy of the hippocampus, a brain structure critical to memory and which shrinks as Alzheimer Disease progresses. Two years later, she showed that children from low socioeconomic status present higher levels of stress hormones, when compared to children from high socioeconomic status. Her future projects include a research program on detection and intervention for stress in the workplace, as well as the development of the DeStress for Success Program that aims at educating children and teenagers on stress and its impact on learning and memory.