BIC Lecture Series - Feb 10 @ 1pm

Prof. Thien Thanh Dang-Vu (Concordia) Functional imaging of the sleeping and sleep-disordered brain

Thanh Dang-Vu earned his M.D. in 2004 at the Université de Liège, in Belgium. He then completed his residency in Neurology and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Science in the same university. He did a post-doctoral fellowship in the department of Neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. He completed a second postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine at the Université de Montreal and Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal. He won several research awards, notably from the Sleep Research Society, the European Sleep Research Society, the Belgian Association for Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine, and the Belgian Neurological Society. He joined Concordia University in 2012, where he was appointed Assistant Professor in Clinical Imaging. He is currently a CIHR New Investigator and a FRQS Research Scholar. Dr Dang-Vu is also an attending neurologist and a researcher at the Institut Universitaire de Gériatrie de Montréal (IUGM), affiliated with the University of Montreal. The research interests of Dr Dang-Vu are focused on the interface between neuroimaging, sleep, and neurology, in order to investigate the neural correlates of spontaneous brain activity, the role of sleep in brain plasticity, the pathophysiology of sleep disorders, and the clinical biomarkers of neurological disease progression.

For example:

- Mechanisms and functions of brain rhythms during sleep (e.g., spindles, slow waves), using PET, fMRI and EEG

- Pathophysiology of sleep disorders (insomnia, hypersomnias, parasomnias), using MRI, SPECT, EEG and behavioural measurements

- Neuroimaging and sleep-related biomarkers of aging, cognitive decline and neurodegenerative disease progression