Gillian Einstein

Director of the Collaborative Graduate Specialization in Women’s Health, University of Toronto

Associate Professor, Psychology and Public Health

Gillian Einstein, PhD, received her AB in Art History from Harvard University and her PhD in Neuroanatomy from the University of Pennsylvania. After doing research in vision as well as Alzheimer disease at Duke University, and science administration at the National Institutes of Health, she immigrated to Canada where she is currently an Associate Professor of Psychology and Associate Professor of Public Health at the University of Toronto. She has edited and annotated a book for MIT Press on foundational papers in Hormones and Behaviour, “Sex and the Brain” and has been a visiting Professor at the Women, Gender and Sexualities Institute at Harvard University (2010). She is also the founder and current director of the Collaborative Graduate Specialization in Women’s Health and a founding member of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences. She is an advisory board member of the Institute of Gender and Health of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Her research is on the effects of estrogens and culture on women’s biologies and on the neurological effects of female genital cutting. She is interested in how gender gets under the skin.

As a neuroscientist, Dr. Einstein works primarily in the fields of neurodegenerative disease, cognitive neuroscience and sex-based biology.  Her laboratory work and scientific publications are in vision, memory and Alzheimer’s disease.  Her current research efforts explore the neurobiological effects of cultural practices such as female genital cutting and the effects of hormonal cycling on mood.

She is an advocate for multidisciplinary research in women’s health and for the increased integration of the basic sciences into our understanding of sex differences.

Einstein is also the editor of Sex and the Brain, published by MIT Press in November 2007.