Jan Thornton is Professor and Chair of the Neuroscience Department at Oberlin College and holds the McGregor endowed chair of neuroscience. She completed her M.S. and Ph.D work in physiological psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States (USA). Afterwards she did postdoctoral research in the USA at the Neuroendocrinology Laboratory at Rockefeller University and the Institute of Animal Behavior at Rutgers-Newark University on steroid receptor mechanisms and sexual behaviors. She then did postdoctoral research at the Oregon Health Sciences University and Oregon Primate Research Center on gonadotropin releasing hormone. She has been at Oberlin College since 1990 and for the past few years her research has focused on the effects of estrogens on memory in an animal model of schizophrenia and on the effects of estrogens and luteinizing hormone (LH) on spatial memory in animal models of aging and Alzheimer’s Disease.