Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Correlations have been established between vascular disorders and cognitive impairments, and also between cardiovascular risk factors and brain white matter lesions. Understanding beyond those correlations how the brain deteriorates in these diseases or if cardiovascular factors contribute to this deterioration is a central question of my research and is essential to help clinicians develop new therapies so that both heart and mind are preserved with aging. The main goal of this research program is to investigate, in the whole brain and at very high resolution, the role of changes in brain microvasculature properties associated with cardiovascular diseases on brain function and structure. This will be achieved by developing state-of-the-art optical imaging techniques combined with biophysical models that aim to explain and predict how these changes will impact clinical imaging measures both in terms of anatomy and function. Our predictions will then be translated to clinical applications using the same models.