Alexander Weber
BSc, MSc, PhD
Investigator, BC Children's Hospital
I am interested in using non-invasive imaging techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in order to help scientists and clinicians better understand brain health and disease, and how to treat an unhealthy brain. MRIs are incredibly useful for these purposes as, unlike an X-ray or a CT scan, they do not give off any harmful radiation, so people can be scanned multiple times, including babies and pregnant mothers. Additionally, MRIs are very diverse in what information they can provide, including high resolution anatomical information, the activity of the brain, specific chemicals or metabolites and their concentrations, and more. When these scans are combined, they can often give us more information together than the sum of their parts. I am interested in improving these techniques, exploring how they can be combined in novel ways, and ultimately in seeing how they can be used to tell us something new about the brain that we did not know before. It is in doing so that I hope to help treat various insults, injuries and diseases of the brain in order to help people lead better lives, or in the case of infants, setting them up on the right track.
