Dr. Lee Ryan completed her undergraduate work at University of Toronto, received a Ph.D. in Cognitive and Clinical Psychology at the University of British Columbia in 1992, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at San Diego. She is the Director of the Cognition and Neuroimaging Laboratories at the University of Arizona, making available magnetic resonance imaging technology to cognitive researchers on campus.

Her research focuses on the neural basis of memory, age-related changes in memory, and how these changes relate to brain functioning. Her research is currently funded by the National Institute on Neurologic Disorders and Stroke, the Arizona Disease Control Research Commission, and the Arizona Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. She has a special interest in memory disorders such as Alzheimer's Disease, AIDS-related dementia, and diseases of white matter including multiple sclerosis.

As an associate professor in the Cognition and Neural Systems program and the Clinical Neuropsychology program at the University of Arizona's Department of Psychology, Dr. Ryan teaches undergraduate classes in human memory and graduate level courses such as Human Brain Behavior Relationships, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Principles of Neuroanatomy. As a clinical psychologist, Dr. Ryan works with individuals and families who are coping with chronic and progressive diseases that effect cognitive functioning, including multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer's disease.

Selected Recent Publications:

Glisky, E.R., Ryan, L., Reminger, S., & Hayes, S. (in press). I understand, aber ich verstehe nichts: A case of psychogenic amnesia. Neuropsychologia.
Schnyer, D., Ryan, L., Trouard, T., & Forster, K. (2002). An event-related fMRI examination of masked word priming: Are signal reductions related to conscious experience of the prime? Neuroreport.
Ryan, L., Hatfield, C., & Hofstetter, M. (2002). Caffeine reverses the time-of-day effect on memory performance in older adults. Psychological Science.
McCabe, K., Houser, D., Ryan, L., Smith, V., & Trouard, T. (2001). A functional imaging study of cooperation in two-person reciprocal exchange. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98, 11832-11835.
Ryan, L., Nadel, L., Keil, K., Putnam, K., Schnyer, D., Trouard, T., & Moscovitch, M. (2001). Hippocampal complex and retrieval of recent and very remote autobiographical memories: Evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging in neurologically intact people. Hippocampus, 11: 707-714.
Ryan, L., Ostergaard, A., and Norton, L. (2001). Explicit and implicit word stem completion: Declines in performance across the lifespan and the role of search processes and familiarity. Memory and Cognition, 29, 678-690.
Heyes, M.P., Ellis, R.J., Ryan, L., Childers, M.E., Grant, I., Wolfson, T., Archibald, S., & Jernigan, T.L. (2001). Elevated cerebrospinal fluid quinolinic acid levels are associated with region-specific volume loss in HIV infection. Brain, 124, 1033-1042.
Nadel, L., Samsonovich, A., Ryan, L., & Moscovitch, M. (2000). Multiple trace theory of human memory: Computational, neuroimaging, and neuropsychological results. Hippocampus, 10, 352-368.