Dr. Brandi K. Ormerod obtained her B.Sc. (honours) in Psychology from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, studying the pharmacology of behavior mediated by the hippocampus and basal forebrain. Dr. Ormerod then obtained a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of British Columbia, Canada. While at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Ormerod received a scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada and a fellowship from the Killam Foundation to investigate the effects of estradiol, a metabolite of the steroid hormone estrogen, on the production and survival of new granule neurons in the hippocampus of adult rodent species. Briefly, she found that estradiol first increases (within 4 h) and then decreases (within 48 h) the production of new granule neurons. In addition, she found that estradiol potently enhances the number of new granule neurons that survive over time. Dr. Ormerod is now working as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Theo Palmer in his laboratory at Stanford University. Her work at Stanford focuses upon understanding the functional role of adult neurogenesis, how the vascular system influences neurogenesis at the cellular (using a culture system) and systems level (in the rodent nervous system) in both normal and disease states. She is particularly interested in discovering how to stimulate neurogenesis in normally non-neurogenic regions of the adult CNS to potentially replace cells lost in Parkinson's disease.