Gillian Einstein

Gillian Einstein is The Wilfred and Joyce Posluns Chair in Women’s Brain Health and Aging, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, and Adjunct Scientist at Baycrest and Women’s College Hospitals. She is a board member of the International Gender Medicine Society, past-Chair of the Canadian Institutes of Health’s Institute of Gender and Health Advisory Board (2014-2024), and Founder and President of the Canadian Organization of Gender and Sex (COGS) Research. She leads the Women, Sex, Gender, and Dementia Cross-Cutting Program for the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration and Aging and Co-Leads the University of Toronto’s Women’s Brain Health Rounds. She has published on vision, Alzheimer disease, pain, sleep, and the effects of estrogens’ effects on memory and cognition. She is funded by CIHR, Brain Canada, The Ontario Brain Institute, the Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation (CABHI), and the Women’s Brain Health Initiative to understand how early life events, including surgeries and cultural practices, affect the trajectory of women’s brain health over the lifespan. Her lab’s current focus is on how estradiol loss and treatment as well as stigma and immigration affect memory and cognition in diverse populations of women.

Professor Einstein uses a methodology that she developed called, "Situated Neuroscience" that employs a combination of qualitative, quantitative (questionnaires), and physiological (neuropsychology, brain imaging, blood biomarkers, polysomnography) methods (Very Mixed Methods) to explore how both sex and gender mediate women’s brain health.