James G. Burns
Appointment
Junior Fellow Academy - Alumni
Institution
University of Toronto at Mississauga
Country
Canada 
James Burns is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Human Development at the University of Toronto. He was a CIFAR Junior Fellow from January 2010 to December 2011, supervised by Experience-based Brain and Biological Development (EBBD) Program Co-Director and Fellow Marla Sokolowski in the Department of Biology, University of Toronto at Mississauga. James obtained his PhD in 2007 in the University of Toronto’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, with Drs. Helen Rodd and James Thomson as his thesis advisors. In 2009/2010, he completed a two-year NSERC-supported postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Frederic Mery at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. James also holds an MSc in Biological Sciences from Simon Fraser University, and completed his BSc in Zoology at the University of Calgary.
James uses approaches from psychology and evolutionary biology to investigate how stress in the early environment contributes to variation in memory capacity within a species. He initially worked as a field biologist on the effects of stress caused by predators on migratory shorebirds and, later, on tropical fish. James now works with fruit flies, a model system for testing questions in evolutionary biology and neurobiology, in the laboratory to test his ideas. Of particular interest is why children exposed to adverse early environments react strongly to stressful events, but so too do children raised in very supportive and protective environments. James plans to test how enhanced stress reactivity may be adaptive to the early environment, how interactions between genes and the environment may maintain genetic variation in stress reactivity, and how enrichment of the environment later in life might alleviate some negative effects of stress reactivity.
James uses approaches from psychology and evolutionary biology to investigate how stress in the early environment contributes to variation in memory capacity within a species. He initially worked as a field biologist on the effects of stress caused by predators on migratory shorebirds and, later, on tropical fish. James now works with fruit flies, a model system for testing questions in evolutionary biology and neurobiology, in the laboratory to test his ideas. Of particular interest is why children exposed to adverse early environments react strongly to stressful events, but so too do children raised in very supportive and protective environments. James plans to test how enhanced stress reactivity may be adaptive to the early environment, how interactions between genes and the environment may maintain genetic variation in stress reactivity, and how enrichment of the environment later in life might alleviate some negative effects of stress reactivity.