I am Davide Boido and I am currently a researcher at NeuroSpin in the NeuroPhysics team.

I am physicist with a Ph.D. in Robotics and Neuroscience. My passion is to harness approaches derived from Physics to study brain dynamics and this pushed me to use advanced technologies for functional imaging. At NeuroSpin, with my collaborators, we use ultra-high field MRI scanners on rodents and humans. I enjoy coupling fMRI data with optical, acoustical and electrophysiological recordings.

Ongoing Research

• Sensory evoked fast BOLD fMRI dynamics in rodents
• Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer MRI in rodents and humans to map glutamate and other biologically relevant molecules in health and diease
• Sensory evoked fast BOLD fMRI in Small Vessels Disease patients (within the RHU TRT_cSVD project)

My background

I got a Master in Physics at the University of Genoa, Italy, with a final report on a study I made at the Biophysics Institute of CNR about the electrophysiological properties of potassium voltage-senstivie ion channels. In 2007 I was awarded a Ph.D fellowship on Humanoid Technologies by the Italian Institute of Technology. During my Ph.D. I used multi-electrodes arrays (MEAs) to study the proapagation of epileptic ictal events in mouse brain slices.

In 2010 I moved to Istituto C. Besta in Milan in Marco de Curtis’ lab to continue the study of seizure-like events propagation and termination in the isolated guinea pig brain. During this post-doc I could also analyze stereo-EEG data fomr epileptic patients, particularly electrically evoked potentials, which reveal functional brain connectivity, to find epilptic foci. It was about that time that I realized the importance of fMRI to investigate brain dynamics in humans and animal models.

In 2013 I moved to Inserm at Université Paris Descartes (now Université Paris Cité), in Paris, in Serge Charpak’s lab, fashinated by the investigation of the neurovascular basis of BOLD fMRI. In this post-doc I developed and used in vivo preparations for Two-Photon Microscopy, functional ultrafast ultrasounds (fUS) and BOLD fMRI at ultra-high field. Based on those data, I could assess the linear relationship between neuronal and vascular responses and the fast dynamics of neurovascular coupling.

In 2020, I joined the NeuroPhysics team of NeuroSpin-CEA as a tenured researcher. I mainly focus on functional MRI on mice at 17.2T with sensory stimulations to observe fast neurovascular dynamics. With the help of a multi-modal approach, functional ultrasounds, and fiber spectroscopy, I want to assess the limits of spatiotemporal resolution achievable with ultra-high magnetic fields. I use the MR sequences developed by the NeuroPhysics team, like Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST), to understand brain metabolism and improve the detection of the epileptic focus in animal models and patients.