Justine Saade-Sergent was a researcher in the cognitive neuroscience field. She was an associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University from 1979 - 1982. Sergent was considered a top scientist in her field, until she was anonymously accused of violating research ethics. Attacks on her character and research caused significant stress. Her and her husband committed suicide together less than two years later. Three years after her death, the inquiry was unable to come up with any evidence of fraud.
Early life and education
Justine Saade was born March 31, 1950 in Lebanon. While teaching there, she met her later-to-be husband Yves Sergent. They then moved to France where they married. Justine Sergent later enrolled at McGill University where she earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees.
Research
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, Sergent found that there were different patterns of activation in response to the two different required tasks, face processing and 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.
Scandal and death
The story of Justine Sergent represents an infamous case of workplace mobbing in Canadian academia. It happened at McGill University under the stewardship of David Johnston. Her mobbing culminated in July 1992, in an anonymous letter, when Sergent was accused of violating ethical research procedures. 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 PET scan, which requires the injection of radioactive isotopes. Sergent responded that the approval remained in effect, since nothing in the original experiment for which she had gotten approval had changed but the stimuli. In 1993, Johnston reprimanded Sergent for her failure to report this 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 letter 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. One of these letters was received by the Montreal Gazette and on April 9, 1994, they published an article on Sergent's 1993 reprimand. The weekend after this article was published, Sergent and her husband were found dead in their garage from carbon monoxide poisoning. The coroner pronounced their time of death 11:40 am April 12, 1994. There was a suicide note citing the anonymous letter as a reason for their suicide. The note was published in both the Gazette and La Presse. An inquiry into Johnston's actions against Sergent at McGill, and her alleged ethical violations, was suspended on July 15, 1997 by Sergent's estate.
Publications
Posthumous
1990s
Sergent, J.. Cognitive and neural structures in face processing. In A. Kertesz, Localization and neuroimaging in neuropsychology. foundations of neuropsychology. San Diego, CA.
Sergent, J., MacDonald, B., Zuck, E.. Structural and functional organization of knowledge about faces and proper names : A prositron emission tomography study. In C. Umiltà, & M. Moscovitch, Attention and performance XV : Conscious and noncouscious information processing
Sergent, J., Ohta, S., MacDonald, B., Zuck, B. Segregated processing of facial identity and emotion in the human brain: A pet study Vis cogn, 1, 349-369
Sergent, J., Corballis, M. C.. 10 ups and downs in cerebral lateralization. In F. L. Kitterle, Cerebral laterality : Theory & research. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Sergent, J., Corballis, M. C., Generation of multipart images in the disconnected cerebral hemispheres Bull Psychon Soc, 28, 309-311
Sergent, J.. Information processing and laterality effects for object and face perception. In G. W. Humphreys, & M. J. Riddoch, Visual object processing: A cognitive neuropsychological approach
Sergent, J. The analytic/holistic dichotomy: An epiphenomenon. Behav Brain Sci, 6, 521
Yoshio Takane, Justine Sergent, Multidimensional scaling models for reaction times and same-different judgments. Psychometrika, 48, 393-423
Sergent, J.. . McGill University, Thesis for Ph.D.
1970s
Sergent, J., Lambert, W. E. Learned helplessness or "learned incompetence"? Can J Behav Sci, 11, 257-273
Sergent, J., Binik, Y. M. On the Use of Symmetry in the Rorschach Test. Journal of Personality Assessment, Volume 43, Issue 4, 1979. pp. 355–359.
