Sharna Jamadar is Associate Professor (Research) and NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellow at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health & Monash Biomedical Imaging.

Sharna leads the Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab. Her research is focused on understanding how our life experiences change our brains, and how this may confer resilience to the ageing process.  She is particularly interested in developing and applying novel imaging methods to study brain connectivity and its change across the lifespan. In addition, Sharna also has an emerging interest in the neuroscience of parenthood, and her team has proposed the new hypothesis that parenthood contributes to cognitive reserve and resilience to the ageing process. Sharna is an expert in multimodal neuroimaging, and uses a number of imaging techniques to understand cognitive control, including positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG) and oculomotor measures (eye-tracking) to study the brain. 

At Monash Biomedical Imaging, Sharna's team leads the development of simultaneous functional PET/MR imaging in humans at the facility. Sharna and her team has developed novel PET/MR measures that provide high resolution mapping of the function, structure, and metabolic efficiency of the brain. For the first time, these new techniques allow researchers to study task-related changes in brain function and metabolism with a temporal resolution below 20sec. This work will have substantial implications for our understanding of how the brain dynamically uses energy; and Sharna will use these new methods to understand how the metabolic efficiency of the brain changes across the lifespan.

To date Sharna has received over $12M in competitive funding, including grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). Sharna has received numerous awards for the quality of her work, including the Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society (ACNS) Young Investigator Award (2023), Distinguished Early Career Contribution to Psychopharmacology (Society for Psychophysiological Research, USA, 2018), and awards from Society for Neuroscience (USA), American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and Schizophrenia Research Institute (Australia). In 2016 she was accepted into the inaugural Homeward Bound Antarctic leadership program for women. In 2018 she was accepted into the prestigious Science & Technology Australia Superstars of STEM program. And in 2023 Sharna was accepted into the Australian Academy for Technical Sciences & Engineering (ATSE) Elevate Leaders Program.

Sharna is committed to service and advocacy in the scientific and general communities. She was invited to serve on the Australian Academy of Science Equity & Diversity Reference Group in 2020, and was elected to the Executive of the Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society in 2018. She is also co-founder of the Australasian Women in Neuroscience Network. Since 2016, Sharna has contributed to over 200 general media articles, including pieces in BBC, New Scientist, Cosmos, Fairfax Media, News Ltd, Channel 10 and ABC Radio National. 

cognitive ageing, healthy ageing, parenthood, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging