Denise Cai is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

There, she performed an honors thesis under the mentorship of Ebbe Ebbesen entitled "Computational model of rape and assault cases."

She continued her education at UCSD, pursuing her doctoral degree in Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience, working with advisors Sara Mednick, Stephan Anagnostaras, and Michael Gorman.

[2] Specifically, she found that REM sleep enhances the integration of unassociated memories and is associated with processes of abstraction and generalization that facilitate problem solving and discovery.

[3] Cai received her Ph.D. in 2010 and then moved to the University of California, Los Angeles for a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratories of Alcino J. Silva and Peyman Golshani.