Neurosalience #S5E3 with Alan Evans - 40 years of brain imaging & creating infrastructure for all

Our guest is today is Dr. Alan Evans. He completed his Ph.D. (1979) and post-doctoral fellowship studying structure-function interaction of proteins at the Department of Biophysics at Leeds University in the U.K.  Subsequently he worked for five years as a PET physicist at Atomic Energy of Canada in Ottawa.

In 1984, he joined the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University, where his research interests include multimodal brain imaging with PET and MRI, structural network modelling, and large scale neural informatics.

For the past 40 years, he has been an institution at McGill University. He is the co-director of the Ludmer Centre and He is currently Co-Director of both the Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics and Mental Health and the Helmholtz International BigBrain Analytics Learning Laboratory (HIBBALL). He is Scientific Director of McGill’s “Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives” (HBHL) , and Scientific Director of the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP). The technical infrastructure underpinning CONP includes a multi-modal databasing system (LORIS)  and an international grid-processing portal (CBRAIN) both developed in Prof. Evan’s MCIN lab. These platforms also support international brain networks, notably the Canada-China-Cuba Axis and the Global Brain Consortium, both co-chaired by Prof. Evans. Furthermore, he was named the Victor Dahdaleh Chair in Neurosciences in October of 2022.

Episode producers

Xugian Michelle Li

Nagashree Thovinakere