Sandra Black, MD, FRCP(C) is an internationally renowned cognitive and stroke neurologist who holds the inaugural Brill Chair in Neurology, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. A leading clinical trialist in dementia, she is the current Executive Director of the Toronto Dementia Research Alliance, a multi institutional collaborative network of memory programs at the University of Toronto involving Baycrest, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, St. Michael’s Hospital, Sunnybrook HSC and Toronto Western Hospital, UHN. She is also the Sunnybrook Site Director of the Heart & Stroke Foundation Canadian Partnership for Stroke Recovery and the Hurvitz Brain Sciences Research Program Director at Sunnybrook Research Institute. In 2011 she was named to the Order of Ontario, cited as an assiduous physician leader and influential architect of the Ontario Stroke System. She has authored/co-authored over 450 papers in a 25-year research career that has bridged dementia and stroke, using neuroimaging to study brain behavior relationships, with a recent focus on interactions of Alzheimer’s and silent stroke disease. She has earned numerous mentorship and research awards, and elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2012. In 2015 she received the U of T Faculty of Medicine Dean’s Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award and was appointed an Officer to the Order of Canada for her contributions to Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and vascular dementia.
Dr. Black's research foci include the following:
  • Mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease
  • Vascular cognitive impairment and cerebral small vessel disease
  • Parkinson’s disease, Lewy body spectrum disorder and frontotemporal dementia (behavioural variant, primary progressive aphasia)
  • Apraxia and aphasia
  • Stroke recovery
  • Clinical trials in dementia and its prevention
  • Neuroimaging biomarkers and brain-behaviour relationships

For a list of Dr. Black's publications, please visit PubMed, Scopus or ORCID.


Brill Chair in Neurology, University of Toronto, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre