Badhwar Amanpreet
Ph.D.
Assistant Professor at the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology, Faculty of Medicine (UdeM)
Contact information
Centre de recherche, IUGM
4545 chemin Queen-Mary
Montréal, Québec
Canada H3W 1W5
Bureau : M5834
(514) 340-3540 #3345
amanpreet.badhwar@criugm.qc.ca
Biography
Dr. Amanpreet Badhwar is an Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pharmacology and Physiology, and a Principal Investigator at the Centre de recherche de l’Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal (CRIUGM). She is a member of the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA). She is also actively engaged in several committees of the International Organization for Human Brain Mapping. Dr. Badhwar has held several prestigious scholarships over the years, and was recently awarded the Chercheur-boursier Junior 1 from the Fonds de recherche du Québec.
From the undergraduate to postdoctoral level, Dr. Badhwar’s path has been to study neurological disease by combining different data types, starting with small-scale genetics and brain imaging early in her career, and progressively moving to “big data” in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Dr. Badhwar’s multi-institutional PhD work under the supervision of Professor Edith Hamel at McGill University combined the themes of multimodal research (neuroimaging, proteomics, and measures of neurovascular coupling), to tease apart the contributions of neuronal and cerebrovascular damage on cognitive dysfunction in AD, and the impact of drug treatment on these components.
Elements of Dr. Badhwar’s postdoctoral work sought to characterize the heterogeneity in AD cohorts using resting-state functional MRI connectivity, an emerging biomarker of synaptic or network dysfunction in AD. These investigations contributed to the understanding of connectivity measures in AD from three different perspectives: group-level connectivity, connectivity subtypes, and individual connectivity fingerprint.
Another important aspect of Dr. Badhwar’s postdoctoral work was focused on establishing a biomarker roadmap for the Canadian Consortium for Neurodegeneration in Aging, where she and her colleagues proposed an analytic framework for generating multiomics biomarkers from imaging, genomics, metabolomics and other modalities.
Currently, Dr. Badhwar directs the Multiomics Investigation of Neurodegenerative Diseases (MIND) Lab.
Research interests
The laboratory of Dr. Badhwar focuses on integrating observations from in-vivo imaging and molecular ‘omics’ in the study of Alzheimer’s Disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, with the goal of discovering new biomarkers and therapeutic targets, and improving methods to speed the drug discovery process.
Research Themes and Projects:
- Theme I: Multiomics investigation of age-related dementias – focus on disease mechanisms and prediction
- Current projects
- Theme II: Novel blood-based biomarker development in age-related dementias
- Current projects
