Born and educated in New York City, Susan J. Sara received a BA in psychology from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD from University of Louvain (Belgium). After post doctoral studies at Oxford University and NYU Medical School, she was recruited by the CNRS (France), establishing  the group ‘Neuromodulation and Cognitive Processes’ at the University Paris VI, which she headed until her retirement.  Dr Sara is currently Directrice de Recherche Emerite at the College de France and Adjunct Professor at New York University Medical School. SJS has been a visiting Professor at the Institute of Neurosciences in Shanghai and at Yamaguchi Medical School, Japan and a visiting scientist at the Weizmann Institute, Israel. She is past president of the European Brain and Behavior Society and was Chair of FENS/IBRO schools committee, Chair of IBRO Alumni committee, member of FENS programme committee and FENS executive Committee; she is currently a theme chair on the SfN programme committee. She has served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Nencki Institute (Warsaw) and the Max Planck Insitute for Biological Cybernetics (Tuebingen), as well as on several advisory panels for the EU and European Research Council and other national scientific agencies.  Her research focuses on the neurobiological basis of memory formation and retrieval. Combining in vivo electrophysiology and pharmacology with behavioral analysis, her thesis and subsequent publications provided early challenges to the consolidation hypothesis.  She published the first paper demonstrating ‘reconsolidation after reactivation of memory’ in 1997 and later showed the importance of the noradrenergic system in this reconsolidation process.  She studies  the role of the noradrenergic locus coeruleus (LC) in cognitive processes by recording the activity of neurons in this nucleus in behaving rats, engaged in various cognitive tasks.  SJS elucidated the functional role of this tiny nucleus in modulating the encoding and off-line memory consolidation, in concert with activity in frontal cortex and hippocampus.  She demonstrated the role of sleep oscillations and associated LC activity in modulation of memory.  Her contributions merited her the Montyfon prize from the French Academy of Sciences. She is currently involved in developing  optogenetic methods to stimulate or inhibit activity of LC neurons at critical periods during learning or during off-line memory consolidation.