Cécilia Samieri, DVM, PhD

Cécilia Samieri, DVM, PhD, is a Senior Researcher in Epidemiology of Ageing and Cognitive Function at INSERM U897 and Université de Bordeaux 2, Bordeaux, France.  Her research has an aim of understanding how environmental factors, in particular diet, influences the aetiology of brain diseases and conditions in aging, such as dementia, cognitive decline or stroke.  Since environmental factors have a pleiotropic role in health, a broader perspective of her research has recently focused on environmental strategies to maintain overall health in aging.  Specifically, she has contributed to demonstrating the impact of a healthier diet in midlife (eg., a Mediterranean diet) for healthy aging.

There is increasing evidence that a number of age-related diseases originate in midlife and even in earlier periods of life.  For example, it is now recognized that lesions associated with age-related brain diseases accumulate silently over decades before brain diseases in the late-life.  At the same time, brain plasticity, which provides more numerous neurons and connections – globally referred to as “brain reserve” – to cope with lesions and maintain optimal cognitive performances with aging, start developing in the first decades of life.

Dr. Samieri is currently extending her research interests to the investigation of environmental factors and brain structure of young adults in a large ongoing cohort of French students.  A better understanding on how the environment shapes brain structural plasticity in early adult life will eventually help designing future prevention strategies.

Dr. Samieri has trained in France and the USA in mathematics, veterinary medicine, methodology and statistics in biomedical research, epidemiology, and neuro-imaging.