Simon Duchesne, P.Eng., Ph.D., attended the Royal Military College of Canada (Kingston, ON) where he obtained his B.Eng. in Engineering Physics in 1993. Simon then held entry and mid-level management positions in the military and private sectors before returning to academia in 1999, obtaining his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from McGill University (Montreal, QC) in 2005. Following post-doctoral studies in Rennes (FRA), he returned to Quebec City in 2007 where he founded his laboratory at the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Québec, dedicated to developing neuroimaging-based biomarkers for neuropsychiatric diseases, including Alzheimer’s. A Fonds de recherche Québec-Santé Junior Scholar, he is now a Full Professor in the Department of radiology at Université Laval. His techniques, published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, have been applied successfully in diseases with vastly different aetiologies, such as Alzheimer‘s disease, Parkinson‘s disease, and temporal lobe epilepsy. Dr. Duchesne‘s research has been peer-funded notably by the Fonds de la Recherche Québec - Santé, the Ministère du Développement Économique, de l‘Innovation et de l‘Exportation du Québec, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the National Science and Engineering Research Council, the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada and the American Alzheimer‘s Association. 

Besides his research program, Dr. Duchesne is involved in numerous leadership roles at the local, provincial, national and international levels. He is co-Founder and Board member of the Québec City Consortium for Imaging in Neurosciences and Mental Health; Université Laval representative on the Scientific Committee of the FRSQ-funded Quebec Bio-Imaging Network; co-head and neuroimaging theme leader of the Consortium d’identification précoce de la maladie d’Alzheimer, a FRQ-Santé funded network; and neuroimaging theme leader of the Canadian Consortium for Neurodegeneration and Aging. At the IUSMQ, he leads the soon-to-be operational Unité de Neuroimagerie de Québec, the first human 3T/animal 7T imaging platform dedicated to neurosciences in the Quebec area.

Dr. Duchesne has substantial experience in knowledge transfer, including scientific event planning. He was the co-director of The Breast Practices, a series of educational events on breast cancer for physicians that reached over 3,750 physicians from more than 60 countries in over 14 international events and 35 webinars. He was a co-organizer of the 2nd North American symposium on TMS and neuroimaging in cognition and behavior (Québec City, Canada); member of the Local Organizing Committees of the 2011 Human Brain Mapping Conference (Québec City, Canada), and Chair of the Hippocampus symposium at that same conference; and member of the Program Committee for the 2011 MICCAI Workshop on Computational Anatomy and Physiology of the Hippocampus (Toronto, Canada). He was the General Chair of the 2017 MICCAI conference in Quebec City. In October 2011, he co-founded True Positive MD Inc., a spin-off company dedicated to commercializing a service platform for brain image analysis in the area of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.