Rosemary Bagot facts for kids

Rosemary C. Bagot, born in 1981, is a Canadian scientist who studies the brain. She is a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her main work is to understand how the brain changes in people who have depression. She wants to find out why some people get depressed after stressful events, while others do not.

Education and Early Research

Rosemary Bagot went to the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. There, she earned a degree in psychology. After graduating, she worked as a research assistant. She studied how the brain learns and remembers, especially about scary experiences. She also looked at how brain development affects learning and memory.

Later, she earned her PhD in neuroscience at McGill University. Her research focused on how a mother's care can change the brain and affect learning, memory, and how the brain handles stress. She also spent time studying at the University of Amsterdam. After her PhD, she did more research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Here, she explored how certain brain changes can help people become strong against depression or make them more likely to get it.

Understanding Stress and Depression

Dr. Bagot uses many different ways to study stress and depression in her lab. She combines tools that look at tiny parts of the brain, like cells and molecules, with ways to study behavior. She uses special methods like looking at brain activity in living animals and studying their genes. This helps her understand how changes in genes and brain circuits might lead to behaviors linked to depression.

A lot of her research tries to find out which genes or brain parts might make someone more likely to get depression or help them stay strong against it. For example, she found that a part of the brain called the ventral hippocampus is important. Animals that are strong against stress have less activity in this brain area. She also found that how a mother cares for her young can affect how well their brains work later in life, especially when things are challenging.

Awards and Recognitions

Dr. Bagot has received several awards for her work. These include the NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation in 2015. She was also named a William Dawson Scholar at McGill University. She is a member of several important science groups, like the Society for Neuroscience.

Sharing Knowledge

Dr. Bagot believes it is important to share what scientists learn with others. She says that scientists are lucky to do a job they love. She feels they have a duty to do their work well and share their discoveries. This helps them make a bigger difference in the world.