Bibliographical Notes

B.A., B.Sc., M.A., Ph.D. (Université de Montréal); post-doctoral studies (Stanford University, California).

Professor, Psychology Department and School of Optometry, Université de Montréal. Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Adjunct Professor, Départments of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Montréal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada

Guest Professor, The PET-center, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Danemark.

Research interests

For more than 20 years, my research has focused on Brain and Behavior relationships, and on the development and plasticity of the central nervous system through the study of sensory systems, in particular the visual system. In order to reach our goals, our laboratory uses a wide variety of experimental techniques on various animal species (hamsters, cats and monkeys) including normal and brain-lesioned human subjects. The research methods used include neurobehavioral evaluation, neuroanatomy, single unit physiology and brain imaging techniques such as PET and fMRI. Our research program is supported by grants from the Medical Research Council of Canada (MRC), The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Ministry of Education of the Province of Québec (Fonds FCAR) and by the Danish Medical Research Council.

Ongoing projects

1-Functional aspects of surgically-induced novel retinal projections to the auditory thalamus of the hamster.

2- Plasticity of retinofugal projections and functional recovery in early hemispherectomized monkeys.

3-Neural mechanisms for processing and coding motion information in cats.

4- Survival of ganglion cells in the retina of visual cortex-lesioned kittens following BDNF treatment.

5- Neural substrates of biological motion and motion-in-depth revealed by PET imaging in normal human subjects.

6- Anatomical substrates of stereoscopic depth perception in normal human subjects studied with PET imaging.

7- Contribution of the residual hemisphere and subcortical structures to residual vision in hemispherectomy revealed by PET and fMRI.

8- Plasticity of the visual system in cases with congenital anomalies of the occipital lobes studied with PET methodology

9- fMRI studies of interhemispheric transfer of sensory information in normal subjects and in Alzheimer patients.

¹⁸FDG scan at rest