Dr. Neil Vasdev is the Director of the Research Imaging Centre and Pre-Clinical Research at CAMH. He is also the Director of the Azrieli Centre for Neuro-Radiochemistry and serves as the Chief Radiochemist at CAMH. 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 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 faculty member at Harvard Medical School, prior to returning to CAMH.
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.