Dr. Jean Chen

Dr. Jean Chen is a medical researcher whose interests focus on the need to better understand age-related neurological diseases, and the use of MRI technology to observe the brain in states of healthy aging and disease.

She currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto. She is a Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute and Tier II Canada Research Chair in Neuroimaging of Aging. She currently heads the Chen Lab (Research in Advanced Neuroimaging using MRI). Her research is funded by the CIHR, NSERC and the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

Dr. Jean Chen’s educational background includes an MSc (2004) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Calgary, and a PhD (2009) in Biomedical Engineering from McGill University. She completed her postdoctoral work on multimodal MRI of brain aging at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Harvard Medical School (2011), and joined MBP as faculty in 2011.

Dr. Chen’s innovations include techniques for using resting-state functional MRI, arterial-spin labeling MRI, cerebrovascular-reactivity mapping, diffusion MRI and simultaneous EEG-fMRI to understand the link between brain metabolism and vascular health in healthy aging, mild-cognitive impairment, late-life depression, hypertension, diabetes, and stroke. Her work has demonstrated, for the first time, distinct patterns of vascular and structural changes in normal aging. The research has led directly to a new imaging processing methodology for multi-modality imaging in the community of aging.

Dr. Jean Chen is on the editorial boards of NeuroImage, Frontiers Neuroscience -- Brain Imaging Methods, the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, Aging Brain and Aperture Neuro. She is a member of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).