Dr Thaarvena Retinasamy is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Jeffery Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree majoring in Medical Bioscience from Monash University Malaysia in 2013. She began her first stint in research when she joined the Brain Research Institute of Monash Sunway (BRIMS) in 2014. She then went on to pursue her PhD in Neuroscience in 2015 under the supervision of Dr Mohd Farooq Shaikh. During her PhD program under the Neuropharmacology Research Cluster lab, she developed her expertise in neurodegenerative diseases particularly in Alzheimer’s disease. Her PhD work was to develop various Alzheimer’s disease models that enables the different Alzheimer’s hypotheses to be tested using a Malaysian based plant extract called “Misai kucing”. She graduated in 2019 and currently works as a postdoctoral research fellow under the guidance of her former supervisor, Dr Mohd Farooq Shaikh.

Dr Thaarvena’s research interest is motivated by the need to better comprehend the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases, specifically in exploring the gaps in the neural basis of neurocognitive disorders and cognitive aging, including changes in learning and memory. She has garnered an arsenal of skills in cognitive and behavioural techniques like stereotaxic surgery, animal model disease development, various behaviour paradigms, PCR techniques and immunohistochemistry techniques which are useful for evaluating brain-behaviour associations. In the past years, she has published several peer-reviewed journal articles and has also presented in international conferences.