BENGALURU: Moved by her great-grandmother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s and witnessing her grandparents’ memory loss with age, 26-year-old Meenakshi Menon from Bengaluru, who had done extensive research on cognitive ageing, earned a scholarship worth over Rs one crore.Meenakshi made this decision at the age of 17, and now, nine years later, she is preparing to start her PhD in Cognitive Sciences at Georgia State University in the USA. She chose to study the psychological and clinical aspects of ageing, focusing on developing interventions to maintain memory and addressing gaps in ageing research.Coming from a pure science educational background, Meenakshi, who was in Mumbai in 2015, chose psychology as her elective subject during that year. While studying psychology as an elective provided her with only limited details, what truly captured her interest and hit her personally were her great-grandmother’s stories of struggle.“My dad often told me about his grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, which destroys memory and other important mental functions,” she said. He once mentioned that although times have changed, the treatment options and research in the field have not advanced much even today. This struck Meenakshi deeply, as she was close to her grandparents. Motivated by this, she decided to study psychology and focus on helping people deal with ageing-related problems like memory loss.Meenakshi majored in Psychology during her undergraduate studies and completed her master’s in Applied Psychology from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai.Currently residing in JP Nagar with her family, Meenakshi worked as a researcher at the Centre for Brain Research (CBR) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in 2023 and was also part of the Tata Longitudinal Study of Aging (TLSA), a long-term cohort study on ageing in the urban Indian population.During the Covid-19 pandemic, observing her grandparents at home, Meenakshi decided to conduct qualitative research on how elderly couples cope with the challenges of COVID-19 during her masters. Subsequently, she also presented her research papers at a conference on healthy ageing at NIMHANS.
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