UWM neuroscientist explores how estrogens regulate memory and brain function

Karyn Frick likes to think big. In college, she spent the summer after her junior year studying the neurobiology of memory in a lab at Johns Hopkins University. For hours at a time, Frick would watch rats scurry through mazes, entranced by their behavior.

For Frick, that early experience sparked an interest in memory that would ripple throughout her career. Years later, in a study on mice, she observed that middle-aged females were mentally older - and had worse memory - than their male counterparts. Now a neuroscientist and professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she's working to study how estrogens regulate our memories and brain function.

Her big-picture goal? To better understand how the brain forms memories - and use those insights to develop new treatments for age-related memory loss and dementia.

When she was younger, Frick was drawn to marine biology. "I just thought sea creatures were really cool," she said.