VCID: white matter alterations, exercise and pharmacotherapy
Edith Hamel is Director of the laboratory of Cerebrovascular Research at the Montreal Neurological Institute (The Neuro), and Professor at the Department of Neurology & Neurosurgery at McGill University. She obtained a PhD in Neurobiology (Université de Montréal, Canada), and trained as a post-doctoral fellow in cerebrovascular biochemistry (City of Hope Research Institute, CA, USA), neuroanatomy (The Neuro, Canada), and in cerebrovascular pharmacology (LERS-Synthélabo [now Sanofi], France). She was Project Leader at LERS-Synthélabo for 2 years before joining The Neuro in 1987 as Assistant Professor. She published over 165 peer-reviewed articles and reviews. She received multiple awards including an International Blaise Pascal Research Chair from the French government (2001), and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2017. She was President of the International Society of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism (2013-2015). Her research focuses on the interactions between neurons, astrocytes and microvessels to assure a proper blood supply to activated brain areas, a phenomenon known as “neurovascular coupling” and used as a surrogate marker of brain activity in brain imaging. Her lab investigates how reliable these signals are in conditions that deviate from baseline physiology such as altered brain states and pathologies with a particular interest in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and vascular cognitive impairment and dementia (VCID).