Shady Rahayel, PsyD, PhD

Shady Rahayel is a clinical sleep psychologist and neuropsychologist specializing in geriatrics, an Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada, and an early-career brain imaging researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine. His research program focuses on developing imaging biomarkers for prodromal synucleinopathies and investigating the neurodegenerative mechanisms underlying Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. His team uses brain imaging and advanced computational approaches to study the neurodegenerative mechanisms associated with isolated REM sleep behavior disorder (iRBD), a condition in which over 90% of individuals develop a synucleinopathy within 15 years. His work has reported the presence of neurodegeneration in the brains of iRBD individuals, their correlations with clinical features, and the development of atrophy and perfusion signatures predictive of a dementia phenotype. He also leads a large-scale international initiative on brain imaging in iRBD.