Cassandra J. Lowe

Research

Lowe's research seeks to understand why some individuals are more vulnerable to excessive food consumption, and how interventions, such as aerobic exercise, can be used to improve dietary choices. Her work has appeared in some of the most eminent scientific journals in public health and psychology, including The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Psychosomatic medicine, and Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

Lowe's research has been integral in highlighting the critical role the prefrontal cortex plays in regulating snack food consumption, and how obesity can impact brain health and cognitive functions. Her graduate was instrumental in establishing the causal relationship between activity in the prefrontal cortex and dietary behaviours in healthy young adults. Using inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to decrease activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, she was the first to demonstrate that individuals consume more snack foods when prefrontal activity is less than optimal, an effect that was mediated by decreased executive functions. Critically, these findings were specific to the consumption of hyperpalatable but nutritionally deprived junk foods (e.g., chocolate, potato chips). While Lowe used experimental methods to decrease brain activity, several everyday occurrences, such as acute stress, and sleep restriction, can temporarily reduce brain activity in the prefrontal cortex. Lowe's work has been instrumental in highlighting how these fluctuations in brain activity can increase the likelihood individuals will overindulge in appealing "junk foods", which over time, can increase for excessive adiposity and obesity. Her postdoctoral research has expanded this work to assess to determine the environmental and social factors that influence brain development and self-regulation during adolescence. Other research interests include determining the shared and separate mechanisms driving overconsumption across clinical, subclinical, and healthy populations to develop a better understanding of why some people are more prone to dysregulated eating behaviours, and why some individuals prone to dysregulated eating behaviours develop clinical eating disorders and others do not.

Awards

Lowe has received several prestigious postdoctoral fellowships from BrainsCAN (Tier 1, 2017; Tier 2, 2019) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (2019). In 2014, Lowe won a Brain Star Award from for her work demonstrating that decreased prefrontal activity predisposes healthy young adults to excessive food consumption.