Justine Sergent
| Justine Sergent | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 31, 1950 Lebanon |
| Died | April 11, 1994 (aged 44) Montreal Suicide |
| Residence | Montreal |
| Citizenship | Canadian |
| Nationality | Lebanese |
| Fields | Neuropsychology |
| Institutions | McGill University |
| Education | PhD |
| Alma mater | McGill University |
| Known for | Functional neuroanatomy of face processing: the Fusiform face area |
| Influenced | Nancy Kanwisher |
| Spouse | Sergent |
Justine Saade-Sergent (31 March 31 1950 – 11 April 1994) was a researcher in the field of cognitive neuroscience. She received her PhD from the McGill University. She was an associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University from 1979 - 1982. She had one student, Dalbir Bindra.
Sergent was considered a top scientist in her field, until she was anonymously accused of violating research ethics. The stress of the attack on her character and on her research was so much that she and her husband committed suicide together less than two years later. Three years after death, the inquiry was unable to come up with any evidence of fraud.
Justine Saade was born March 31, 1950 in Lebanon. While teaching there, she met her later-to-be husband Yves Sergent. He brought her back to back to France where they married. Justine Saade-Sergent later enrolled at McGill University where she earned her bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees.
"Justine Sergent was one of the first researchers that brought forth evidence towards the functional neuroanatomy of face processing. She described the Fusiform face area or FFA in 1992.
"Using positron emission tomography (PET), Sergent found that there were different patterns of activation in response to the two different required tasks, face processing verses object processing."
This processing area was later named by Nancy Kanwisher in 1997 "who proposed that the existence of the FFA is evidence for domain specificity in the visual system".
In July 1992 Sergent was accused of violating ethical research procedure in an anonymous letter. She was accused of failing to get approval from an ethics committee for her research on the brain function of pianists. The research included the use of a Positron emission tomography or PET scan, which requires the injection of radioactive isotopes. Sergent's response was that she thought that the approval she had already received maintained in effect. In 1993 Sergent received a reprimand stemming from her failure to report a slight change in stimuli in her experiments to the ethics committee.
Almost two years after the first anonymous letter was sent out, several copies of another anonymous letters were sent out. The letter attempted to further discredit Sergent by linking her research conduct to the case of a Dr. Roger Poisson of St. Luc Hospital. Dr. Poisson had admitted to falsifying records in his breast cancer research.
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