Denise J. Cai, PhD

Denise J. Cai, PhD, is a neuroscientist and associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She completed her PhD in experimental psychology and behavioral neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Los Angeles. Her lab at Mount Sinai focuses on how memories are both stable enough to last a lifetime, but flexible enough to update with new experiences, using cutting-edge tools (like in vivo calcium imaging, optogenetics, chemogenetics). Her team has shown that memory ensembles aren’t fixed snapshots, but dynamic networks that constantly link and reshape our past experiences. Cai is also passionate about making neuroscience accessible and co-developed the Miniscope platform and other open-source tools now used by hundreds of labs around the world, helping the field push forward faster and more collaboratively.