Gerlinde A.S. Metz

Gerlinde A.S. Metz is a Professor of Neuroscience and an AHFMR Senior Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge. Her research program focuses on the influence of experience and environment on brain plasticity and behaviour. Her work in animal models was the first to show that stress affects motor system function, risk of Parkinson’s disease and recovery from stroke. More recently, her laboratory has developed models to explore transgenerational inheritance of stress responses. This work showed that through mechanisms of epigenetic programming, experience in parents, grandparents and beyond can influence health and disease from early development to old age. This research is now leading to the discovery of new predictive biomarkers of disease.