A conversation with Dr. Sharna Jamadar (OHBM 2025 Keynote Interview Series)
Authors: Audrey Luo & Ashley Tyrer
For our next interview, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Sharna Jamadar.
Dr. Jamadar is an Associate Professor at the School of Psychological Sciences and Monash Biomedical Imaging at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. As the chief investigator of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab, Dr. Jamadar studies how life experiences, such as parenthood, change our brains and how these experiences may confer resilience to the aging process through changes in brain connectivity and metabolic efficiency. Her lab uses multimodal neuroimaging, including positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG) and oculomotor measures, to study brain changes throughout the lifespan. Specifically, Dr. Jamadar and her team lead the development of simultaneous functional PET/MR imaging in humans at Monash Biomedical Imaging.
In addition to scientific research, Dr. Jamadar has been committed to advocating for diversity and inclusion in science and beyond. She is the OHBM Diversity and Inclusivity Committee Chair and co-founder of the Australasian Women in Neuroscience Network. She served on the Australian Academy of Science Equity & Diversity Reference Group in 2020 and on the Executive of the Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society since 2018.
We had the privilege of speaking to Dr. Jamadar about her exciting research and career and get a sneak peek of her keynote lecture at OHBM 2025.
Audrey Luo [AL]: Could you introduce yourself to our readers and the kind of research you and your lab conducts?
Dr. Sharna Jamadar [SJ]: I am a cognitive neuroscientist by training, and my lab is interested in how our life experiences change our brains. We’re broadly interested in how our life experiences confer risk or resilience to the aging process – so we’re interested in healthy aging and maintaining brain health into old age. We have two primary research programs in our team. The first – and the one that I will focus on in my keynote – is the development of novel approaches to study connectivity of the brain using simultaneous PET/MR. We’re looking at the brain’s metabolic connectome and examining how it changes across the healthy adult lifespan. This is a technically challenging body of work but I’m really excited by all the new insights we’re making into the way the brain uses energy.
My second research program is on the neuroscience of parenthood. This research is a passion project that was sparked as my colleagues and I were starting families, and has been driven by some talented early career researchers I’ve been lucky to work with. A few years ago, we proposed the novel hypothesis that the experience of parenthood may confer resilience to the aging process, and contribute to a person’s cognitive reserve. I remember thinking, if we all agree that a person’s occupation and leisure activities contribute to cognitive reserve, why wouldn’t the complex and highly dynamic experience of being a parent also be a factor? We’re lucky that our work in this space occurred at the same time that others were getting really interested in the parental neuroscience topic, and the last 5 years has seen a big increase in research in this space. My previous PhD student, Winnie Orchard, who has been the early driving force in this program, will be discussing this work at the OHBM public lecture in Brisbane this year.
AL: How did you become interested in studying the relationships between life experiences, resilience, and aging in the brain?
SJ: A little bit by accident, really. It took me a while to really find my feet as a scientist – I wasn’t one of those people who knew straight away where my focus should lie. I loved research, but it wasn’t until I’d finished two postdocs, and then started my first independent Fellowship, before things clicked into place. I’d always been interested in understanding why some people seem to get older and very quickly start to show signs of age – cognitive decline, frailty, being unable to carry out their activities of everyday life. Whereas others seemed to reach advanced age and show little sign of decline at all – why? And what makes a healthy older brain in the first place? How do we define it? Shouldn’t the starting point for understanding age-related brain pathology be understanding what a healthy older brain looks like?
And then two things happened: my imaging facility got a new PET/MR scanner, and I became interested in using PET to help disentangle some of the physiological confounds that exist when using fMRI in older people. And the second thing was those deep conversations about the lifetime influences of parenthood on the brain. I found myself getting passionate about two seemingly very different areas of research, but from the beginning it was really clear to me that the overarching link is that our wealth of lifetime experiences shape who we are, and our brains too.
AL: Your work is at the forefront of high temporal-resolution simultaneous MRI-PET. What were some challenges you faced in developing simultaneous MRI-PET? What motivated you to pursue developing this multimodal imaging approach?
SJ: This has been the most challenging and rewarding research of my career to date! It’s been such fun. So, our starting point was the now seminal work by Villien, et al. (2014, NIMG) from MGH. They’d published a proof of concept for this technique that they called ‘functional’ PET, where they infused the FDG radiotracer over the course of the scan, and reconstructed the PET images in 1-sec frames in order to create a time series of glucose metabolism. We thought it was quite cool, and as I said before, I thought it might be a way to get around some of those confounds we have when using fMRI in older people. So we started playing with infusion pumps, well counters, attenuation, recons, all that stuff. Mind you, I had never used PET before, and I was really lucky to be surrounded by people who knew what they were doing. Our first step was to basically replicate the Villien, et al. work but acquire fMRI at the same time as well (they’d just acquired structural MRI with their PET). Then we had the brilliant idea to ‘invent’ metabolic connectivity – let’s just do a resting-state functional PET study! I wonder what we’ll find?! It was so laughably ignorant in hindsight – people had been doing metabolic connectivity since the mid-1980s and it predated fMRI connectivity by about a decade. But the functional PET allowed us to take a new and different approach to what had been done before and gain new insights, and I’m really proud of it.
What I love most about this research is that it was just borne from good old fashioned lab work – getting excited about a new technique and just trying things out, failing, and then figuring out a way to make it work. I am so fortunate to get to work in a place where we can say “Oh, I wonder what would happen if we did X?” and being able to pop one of us in the scanner and start mucking about. I work with the most amazing team who make it all happen – talented students like Hamish Deery who will also be at OHBM, and a really supportive radiography, nuclear medicine, and biomedical engineering team who can support all the random ideas for new experiments that pop into my head.
AL: What do you think is the most exciting development that is happening in your field or the broader field of neuroscience?
SJ: This is a good question, our field changes so quickly there is always something really new and important on the horizon. Firstly, I’ve always been so excited about new multimodal approaches to understand the brain. There has been some beautiful work coming out looking at multiple perspectives on connectivity, fusing haemodynamic and metabolic connectivity with genetic data, neurotransmission data and so forth. Our perspective of the brain and its organisation is so closely tied to our measurement tools, and I think the only way we can truly understand is to gather as many different perspectives as we can and fuse them together. Secondly, I am always a sucker for new acquisition approaches. There has been some gorgeous work in whole brain metabolite mapping and brain temperature, and my imaging centre has been playing with some really interesting new hyperpolarised xenon MR imaging. I can’t wait to see the new knowledge gained from these new approaches. Lastly, obviously AI has been a massive change in our field, and I expect that we will see a lot of it at OHBM this year. Right now, I am interested in understanding how we can harness AI from a signal optimisation perspective, as well as how it can better extract the synergies underlying simultaneously acquired data. I’m looking forward to seeing what is presented in Brisbane in this space.
AL: In addition to conducting cutting-edge scientific research, you have been deeply involved in creating inclusive spaces in science through your roles as OHBM Diversity and Inclusivity Committee Chair and co-founder of the Australasian Women in Neuroscience Facebook community. Can you share a moment or experience from your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) journey that has stayed with you and reminded you why this work matters just as much as the science?
Quite simply, science without diversity, equity, inclusivity, and accessibility is boring and of limited utility. What good is neuroscience if it isn’t applicable to everyone? Diversity, equity, and inclusivity ensures that we have a rich population of scientists to pose new questions that haven’t been thought of before, and to interpret the data from multiple perspectives. And accessibility is just good practice – making sure that everyone can see, hear, and gain access to our presentations and published work means it will have the highest impact.
I’m a big proponent of not fixing the people to fit the system, but to fix the system to fit the people. So much of what we can do to ensure everyone has equitable access is pretty easy to implement in practice. That said, some things are hard, and require sophisticated solutions. Women and people assigned female at birth will always be the ones having the babies and stepping away for a while. How do we address this inequity? Other things just require a simple tweak in how we do things, like remembering to use colourblind friendly palettes and using the microphone.
I know that DEI has become this pilloried concept this year. But it really doesn’t need to be controversial – it’s just about doing the right thing by everyone. I will say that one thing that I am proud of for OHBM is the commitment to diversity and inclusivity over recent years. I particularly appreciate the now long-standing commitment to holding meetings only in places where all our members can travel safely – women, LGBTQI+ people, and other minorities. I know that upholding this commitment has made organising conferences over the last few years difficult, and I appreciate the work that has gone into this.
AL: Lastly, what advice would you give to aspiring neuroimagers?
SJ: This may sound trite, but take risks and have fun with your research. In the first five years of my career, I played it safe and did the sort of work that I thought that would be of interest to funding bodies. And I had some success with that – I did get that first major Fellowship after all. But I was always looking for something more and questioning if I had the right career for me. It wasn’t until after I returned from maternity leave that things changed for me. Due to some family health issues, it wasn’t clear if I’d be able to continue working for the long term; I thought I may have to become a full-time carer. I worked three days per week for five years, and even another five years later, I still work four days per week now. I thought, well, if I am not going to be able to keep doing this forever, I’m going to have fun and study what I want to study. And it’s led to the most creative, enjoyable, and impactful research of my career. I’m generally a very risk averse person, but the uncertainty regarding my capacity to work long-term gave me the permission to follow the next shiny thing that took my fancy. I know that I am in a fortunate position – the health issues that were of concern sorted themselves out over the following years, and I work in a place that encourages independence and allows the sort of risk taking I undertook. But my advice to young neuroimagers is to find that thing that excites you, and try to make it happen. That small, unfunded side project might be the thing that becomes central to your research program in the future.
AL: In broad strokes, what will your keynote lecture cover?
SJ: I’m so honoured to have been invited for this keynote. My first OHBM was back in 2008 when it was held in Melbourne, and I was still a student. And almost 20 years later I’ll be up on the stage in Brisbane!
So, my keynote will cover basically everything I’ve learned about metabolic connectivity and the dynamic fluctuations in glucose metabolism that form the brain’s metabolic network. I’ll discuss how the brain’s energy requirements shape the brain’s anatomical and functional architecture, as well as how critical it is for the brain to maintain a reliable and scalable supply of glucose to maintain its functions. I’ll finish off by stepping back and thinking about exciting future directions with this new method, and the new insights that can be gained about the functional architecture of the brain using PET/MR and molecular connectivity.
