Dr. Sandra Weintraub

Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

What got me into this?

Well, okay.

So if you really want to go way back to my undergraduate years at McGill University, McGill was kind of the first place in North America to really be interested in the brain and behavior.

How does your brain behave?

do all the things that you do, think and talk and behave and sing and all of that.

So I was incredibly interested in that, but there was no real field that was a clinical field for people who were interested in brain and behavior, unless you wanted to be a neurosurgeon or a neurologist, which I didn't want to do that.

So over the years, this specialty developed of neuropsychology.

And that's, I decided that's what I wanted to do because neuropsychology is the clinical psychology specialty devoted to working with the results of brain injury.

Not, you know, kind of therapy or your feelings, but really somebody who has been developing normally, has a brain injury, what happens and why does it happen?

And what are the different parts of the brain that cause it to happen?

That's where I really started.

My interest in aging...

I then went to work at the Boston Aphasia Research Center and was very interested in people who had had strokes, who lost their language.

And I worked there for a very long time.

And then when I was ready, finished my degree and ready to get a job, I had my first job at a hospital that had a lot of older patients.

And a lot of the older patients that I was seeing

And in those days, of course, people just never got to medical attention until things were really advanced.

So I was seeing people who were in pretty late stages of dementia.