Associate Professor Jess Nithianantharajah 

Associate Professor Jess Nithianantharajah is Research Lead of the Mental Health Mission at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, and heads the Synapse Biology and Cognition laboratory. She completed her doctorate in behavioural neuroscience at the University of Melbourne and commenced postdoctoral training at the Howard Florey Institute investigating gene-environment interactions on neural plasticity.

She was recruited to the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge UK and held a joint appointment at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge UK working on the development of the rodent touchscreen cognitive tests. She then relocated to the University of Edinburgh before returning to The Florey Institute as an independent group leader. Her research interests lie in understanding how disrupted synaptic and brain connectivity underlie cognitive dysfunction in neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders.