Dr. Neil Vasdev is the inaugural Director of the Azrieli Centre for Neuro-Radiochemistry, based in the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at CAMH. He serves as the Associate Director and Chief Radiochemist of the Research Imaging Centre at CAMH. He is also the endowed Azrieli Chair in Brain and Behaviour, and a 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 received his PhD in chemistry from McMaster University while supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and continued 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 was the Director of Radiochemistry at Massachusetts General Hospital (2011-2017), and he still maintains his faculty appointment at Harvard Medical School.
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 he has received numerous scholarly awards throughout his career.
Publications
View Dr. Vasdev's publications on PubMed.