Dr. Neil Vasdev is the Director and Chief Radiochemist of the Brain Health Imaging Centre at CAMH. He is also the inaugural Director of the Azrieli Centre for Neuro-Radiochemistry. He is the endowed Azrieli Chair in Brain and Behaviour, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Radiochemistry and Nuclear Medicine. In addition, he is a full Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.
He earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from McMaster University while supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). He continued his training with a NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. He began his independent research program and faculty career at CAMH and the University of Toronto in 2004. He served as Director of Radiochemistry at Massachusetts General Hospital from 2011-2017, and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Vasdev was elected as a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS) (2020), Royal Society of Chemistry(UK)(2020), and Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (2021) for his outstanding achievements and contributions to science, the profession and the societies.
Areas of Research
His research focuses on developing and translating new PET imaging agents to use in various brain-based illnesses. Current targets under investigation are the tau protein, which is implicated in Alzheimer’s disease; traumatic brain injuries; brain inflammation in mental illnesses; and cell signaling pathways. Several of the radiotracers developed by his laboratory are in preclinical use worldwide, and many of these compounds have been used for first-in-human neuroimaging studies. Dr. Vasdev has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, and has received numerous scholarly awards throughout his career.
Publications
View Dr. Vasdev's publications on PubMed.