Bernice Grafstein Shanet (born September 17, 1929)[1] is a Canadian neurophysiologist, a professor at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York[2] and a noted specialist in neuroregeneration research.
[4] Shanet is famous for her studies of the transport of materials down the axon nerves and her thesis work on the mechanism of cortical spreading depression, which became a classic in its field and is acknowledged even today.
[2] Shanet then moved on to McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada for graduate school, where she produced her well renowned thesis on the mechanism of cortical spreading depression for her PhD.
She eventually received her PhD in Physiology from McGill University in 1954 under Benedict Delisle Burns, who helped Shanet work on her graduate thesis.
[1] As Shanet became interested in how connections among nerve cells are formed, she began to prepare herself for work in this area by studying with the eminent embryologist, Viktor Hamburger, at Washington University, and by taking the Embryology Course at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory.
[2] Then for her PhD thesis, which Shanet carried out under the guidance of Benedict Delise Burns, she worked on an electrophysiological analysis of the phenomenon of cortical spreading depression in the cerebral cortex.