Jennifer L Bizon, Ph.D.

Dr. Jennifer Bizon is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience and Director of the Eveyln F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute. She received her Bachelor of Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1993) and her Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from University of California, Irvine (1998). She received postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins University (1998-2003) and then established her own laboratory at Texas A&M University prior to joining the University of Florida College of Medicine in 2010. Her research program is broadly focused on understanding brain aging and its implications for cognitive function.

Dr. Bizon’s research program is broadly focused on understanding brain aging and its implications for cognitive function. Specifically, her laboratory employs an integrative approach that combines cognitive assessments with molecular, pharmacological and optogenetic methodologies. Recent work has uncovered disruptions in both glutamatergic and GABAergic signaling in the aged brain that contribute to impairments in cognitive flexibility, working memory and decision making (for example, Banuelos et al., 2014; McQuail et al., 2016, Beas et al., 2017). Her lab has also used optogenetic approaches to demonstrate age-associated differences in the neural circuits of decision making (Hernandez et al., 2019).