Justine Sergent

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (later to become Governor General of Canada). Her mobbing culminated in July 1992, in an anonymous letter, when Sergent was accused of violating ethical research procedures (a known academic mobbing technique). 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 (subjects were now looking at musical notes rather than letters). In 1993, Johnston reprimanded Sergent for her failure to report this slight change in stimuli in her experiments to the ethics committee.

Justine Saade-Sergent (March 31, 1950 – April 11, 1994) 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.

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.