Jason Steffener

Associate Professor

A neuroscientist focused on understanding how some older adults have maintained cognitive performance into late life and why some others are not as fortunate. He combines imaging of brain function and structure, cognitive tasks adapted for each individual and measures of individual differences in how everyone lives and has lived their lives. His approaches use distributed computational power applied to statistical and mathematical models of how advancing age, the brain's structure, the brain's blood flow and how the brain functions to understand cognitive performance.

Background

Completed his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Newark, NJ, USA in 2005 and holds a BSc in Applied Physics and an MSc in Biomedical Engineering, also from NJIT. He joined the Department of Neurology at Columbia University Medical Center, NYC, NY, USA for eight years for a post-doctoral fellowship and continued as faculty. After spending two years as a research scientist at the PERFORM Center at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada he joined the University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in 2016.

Research Interests

• Healthy cognitive aging
• Cognitive reserve
• Brain-behavior relationships
• Neuroimaging
• Moderated-mediation statistical analyses
• Mathematical modeling
• Distributed computing
• Olfaction
• Open science

More Information

• Publications listed on Google scholar
• GitHub: @steffejr
• Email: jsteffen -at- uottawa.ca

Selected Publications

• Cabeza R, Albert M, Belleville S, Craik FIM, Duarte A, Grady CL, Lindenberger U, Nyberg L, Park DC, Reuter-Lorenz PA, Rugg MD, Steffener J, Rajah MN. Maintenance, reserve and compensation: the cognitive neuroscience of healthy ageing. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2018;19(11):701-710.
• Stern Y, Gazes Y, Razlighi Q, Steffener J, Habeck C. A task-invariant cognitive reserve network. Neuroimage. 2018. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.05.033.
• Al Aïn S, Poupon D, Hétu S, Mercier N, Steffener J, Frasnelli J. Smell training improves olfactory function and alters brain structure. Neuroimage. 2019;189:45-54.
• Steffener J, Gazes Y, Habeck C, Stern Y. The Indirect Effect of Age Group on Switch Costs via Gray Matter Volume and Task-Related Brain Activity. Front Aging Neurosci. 2016;8:162.
• Steffener J, Habeck C, O’Shea D, Razlighi Q, Bherer L, Stern Y. Differences between chronological and brain age are related to education and self-reported physical activity. Neurobiol Aging. 2016;40:138-144.