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The Women's Club welcomes Dr Aaron Lam, Dr Catriona Ireland, and Dr Josephine Toltz from The University of Sydney's Spencer-Bennett NeuroMusic Collaborative for a comprehensive look at the intersection of music, sleep, and brain health.
Dr. Lam will provide a brief talk on sleep research in the region, focusing on cutting-edge studies aimed at understanding sleep patterns and disorders. He will also share practical strategies to improve sleep quality, emphasizing the role of sleep in overall brain health. Following Dr. Lam, Dr. Ireland will discuss the work being done at the Healthy Brain Ageing Clinic, where researchers focus on interventions and assessments designed to promote cognitive longevity and reduce the risks of age-related cognitive decline. Finally, Dr. Toltz will present insights from the ongoing NeuroMusic trial, which explores the impact of music on brain function, particularly in relation to cognitive enhancement and neuroplasticity. Does music training improve brain function in older adults with memory difficulties?
Biographies
Dr Aaron Lam is an early career researcher with an interest in the intricate relationships between sleep patterns (including sleep disorders) and the onset and progression of dementia. With a background in nmeuroscience and psychology, his research predominately focuses on how sleep may be a modifiable risk factor for dementia.
Aaron's research examines how sleep and sleep disorders are bidirectionally related to dementia, in particular Alzheimer's Disease and Vascular Cognitive Impairment. His research utilises a range of methodologies including high-density eeg, standard eeg, polysomnography, magnetic resonance imaging, and digital cognitive assessments.
Dr Catriona Ireland graduated from the University of Sydney in 1993 and completed her specialist training in geriatric medicine in 2001. Over the last 20 years her work has centered around assessment, diagnosis and ongoing management of cognitive concerns and dementia in the context of general health and lifestyle.
Since 2016 Dr Ireland has been working at the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre, exploring the modifiable factors in brain ageing and ways we can reduce the risk of dementia in adults of all ages. Her interests include the impact of sleep and psychological health on cognition, and she has joined the CogSleep Centre for Research Excellence to contribute to this important area of research.
Dr Joseph Toltz is a researcher specialising in Jewish music and its migrations, and Manager of Research Support in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. An adjunct tutor from 2009, from 2014-2018 he was a Research Fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, as co-Investigator on “Performing the Jewish Archive”, a four-year UK Arts & Humanities Council large grant. In 2017 he curated the festival “Out of the Shadows: rediscovering Jewish music and theatre” at the University of Sydney, the fourth of five performance festivals sponsored by the grant.
A former fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he is currently co-authoring a book with Dr Anna Boucher on the first collection of Holocaust songs (Manchester University Press, 2023); co-writing a song-cycle with Guta Goldstein, featuring her musical memories as a child survivor of the Łódź Ghetto; working with the exil.Arte Zentrum at the University of Music and the Performing Arts in Vienna (MDW) on the Austrian-Jewish refugee composer, Wilhelm Grosz; and working on musical and dramatic creations from the Dunera Boys (a group of Jewish refugees deported from the UK and Singapore to detention camps in Australia in 1940). In 2018 he was a sponsored speaker at international conferences in London, New York and Chicago, and gave the Al and Malka Green Lecture in Yiddish at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto (see below).
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