Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
Sandra E. Black, MD, FRCP(C) is an internationally renowned cognitive and stroke neurologist, who is a Professor of Medicine (Neurology) in the Department of Medicine, University of Toronto and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, where she held the inaugural Brill Chair in Neurology from 2006-17. A leading clinical trialist in dementia, she is the Executive Director of the Toronto Dementia Research Alliance, a collaborative network of five institutional UofT memory programs. She is Sunnybrook Site Director of the Heart & Stroke Foundation Canadian Partnership for Stroke Recovery and Hurvitz Brain Sciences Research Program Director at Sunnybrook Research Institute.
Sandra Black has published over 560 papers (Scopus H index 86; Google 110; >70,000 citations) in a 30-year research career that has bridged dementia and stroke, using neuroimaging in conjunction with cognition, function and behavior measures to study brain-behavior relationships across the common dementias. Her recent focus has been on relationships of Alzheimer’s and small vessel disease.
She has earned numerous mentorship and research awards, including election to the Royal Society of Canada (2012), the UofT Faculty of Medicine Dean’s Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award (2015), and an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Waterloo (2018). She was named to the Order of Ontario in 2011, cited as an assiduous physician leader and influential architect of the Ontario Stroke System, and in 2015 appointed Officer to the Order of Canada for her contributions to Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and vascular dementia.
Photography credit: Curtis Lantinga for Sunnybrook Research Institute.