Leif Østergaard
Leif Østergaard MSc MD PhD DMSci
Østergaard received his MSc in Astronomy, Physics, and Mathematics in 1992 and his MD in 1994 from Aarhus University in Denmark. After a research fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he defended his PhD thesis on steroid action in brain tumors, and his DMSci thesis on the cerebral circulation in acute stroke, at Aarhus University in 2000. He is now Consultant at the Department of Neuroradiology at Aarhus University Hospital and Professor of Experimental Neuroradiology at Aarhus University. Since 2004, Østergaard has directed the Danish National Research Foundations Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN), and since 2008 MINDLab, a cross-disciplinary neuroscience and cognition network funded by the Danish Government’s Excellence-initiative. Østergaard has developed methods to study the cerebral microcirculation by MRI and has used them to study the pathophysiology of acute stroke (the perfusion-diffusion mismatch), dementia, and depression. He is interested in how the microcirculation limits the delivery of nutrients such as glucose and oxygen to tissue and whether capillary dysfunction plays a role in aging and disease. He has published 175 original articles in international journals with peer review. Østergaard was elected fellow of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2008 and has received several awards for his research.