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Dr. Sean Nestor awarded Future Leaders grant

September 29, 2023

Congratulations to Dr. Sean Nestor, clinician investigator and interventional psychiatrist at Sunnybrook’s Harquail Centre for Neuromodulation, on receiving the 2022 Future Leaders in Canadian Brain Research grant from Brain Canada, a national convenor of those who support and advance brain research.

The Future Leaders in Canadian Brain Research grant provides support of $100,000 to “accelerate novel and transformative research that will fundamentally change our understanding of nervous system function and dysfunction and their impact on health.”

In addition to Dr. Nestor’s role as clinician-investigator at the Harquail Centre, he is an associate scientist in the Hurvitz Brain Sciences Research Program at Sunnybrook Research Institute and an assistant director of the Clinician Researcher Track Residency Program in Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto.

His current research program at Sunnybrook combines neuroimaging and investigational neuromodulation techniques to understand the mechanisms of brain plasticity and dysfunction in neurological and psychiatric disorders. His lab operates one of Canada's only concurrent TMS-fMRI experimental platforms, and he currently leads therapeutic brain stimulation trials for post-concussive syndrome, treatment-resistant depression, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at Sunnybrook. He has been a co-investigator on investigational treatment trials involving deep brain stimulation for alcohol use disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and high-frequency focused ultrasound treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder and major depressive disorder. He serves as a Canadian site PI for the GenECT study and is a member of the ENIGMA Neuromodulation working group.

He has received funding from CIHR, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Labatt Family Network for Research in Depression, the Tory Trauma Program, the Norris Scholars Award, and the Sunnybrook Foundation.

Congratulations, Dr. Nestor!