Associate Professor Jess Nithianantharajah
BSc (Hons), PhD

Associate Professor Jess Nithianantharajah heads the Synapse Biology and Cognition Group. She is also the Head of Florey Department of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, and co-founder and VP Translational Biology for Phrenix Therapeutics.

She completed her doctorate in behavioural neuroscience at the University of Melbourne, examining synaptic changes following learning and experience. She then commenced postdoctoral training at The Howard Florey Institute to investigate gene-environment interactions modulating experience-dependent synaptic plasticity, before being recruited by Professor Seth Grant as a postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. During that time, she held a joint appointment at the University of Cambridge, working with Professor Tim Bussey and Professor Lisa Saksida on developing the rodent touchscreen cognitive tests – an innovative behavioural tool that has advanced how we model complex learning and mental processes in preclinical rodent models. She relocated to the University of Edinburgh, then returned to Melbourne to establish her independent research group in 2015 at The Florey.

Associate Professor Nithianantharajah’s research interests lie in understanding the neural basis of cognitive dysfunction in brain and mental health conditions, with a focus on changes at the synapse. Her work provided the first evidence of dissecting the cognitive repertoire in mice to show that these cognitive components are differentially regulated by a family of postsynaptic scaffold proteins, providing novel insights into the evolution of cognition. Moreover, her research has been the first to showcase the translational capacity of the touchscreens in assessing cognition in mice and humans carrying mutations in the same gene, providing a novel approach for how to bridge the divide from animal to human studies towards delivering precision medicine for cognitive symptoms in brain and mental health disorders.

Her group have recently established an advanced preclinical neurobehavioural platform to interrogate real-time changes in neural activity and signalling during cognitive processing in freely moving rodent models. These studies integrate rodent touchscreen assays to probe distinct cognitive domains, in vivo imaging tools (e.g. fibre photometry, Miniscope cellular imaging), deep-learning tracking of behaviour (e.g. DeepLabCut, MoSeq) and in vivo pharmacology.

Her team have also established a sophisticated preclinical cognitive testing pipeline to support novel drug discovery with greater clinical predictivity, and currently working to accelerate the development and translation of new therapies for complex mental health conditions, including schizophrenia and depression.