Denise J Cai

Denise Cai is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Education and early career Cai attended the University of California, San Diego, where she received her Bachelor of Science in psychology in 2004. There, she performed an honors thesis under the mentorship of Ebbe Ebbesen entitled "Computational model of rape and assault cases." She continued her education at UCSD, pursuing her doctoral degree in Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience, working with advisors Sara Mednick, Stephan Anagnostaras, and Michael Gorman. Her graduate work focused on how sleep affects memory formation in humans and in mice. In humans, she found that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep facilitates creative thinking, compared to quiet rest and non-REM sleep. Specifically, she found that REM sleep enhances the integration of unassociated memories and is associated with processes of abstraction and generalization that facilitate problem solving and discovery.

Cai received her Ph.D. in 2010 and then moved to the University of California, Los Angeles for a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratories of Alcino J. Silva and Peyman Golshani. She pursued this work with the support of a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health.

Research In 2017, Cai became an assistant professor in the department of neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. There, her research program centers on investigating memory formation.

Awards and honors

Distinguished Scholar Award, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, 2020 National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award, 2019 One Mind Rising Star Research Award, 2019 Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship, 2018 Allen Institute Next Generation Leader, 2017