Researcher Profile: Dr Steven Beyea
Dr. Steven Beyea, a long-time affiliate researcher with the Brain Repair Centre (BRC), has been involved with the centre since its inception. Dr. Beyea is the Scientific Director at BIOTIC (Biomedical Translational Imaging Centre), directing the overall research program of a diverse team of scientists, with the goal of improving Canadian healthcare through researching and commercializing diagnostic imaging technologies.
Knowledge translation grants from the Brain Repair Centre have played a significant role in Dr. Beyea’s current research with Synaptive Medical, a neuroscience company in Toronto. Working on a new design of MRI technology, Dr. Beyea is running initial “first in the world technology” trials at his lab. He is piloting clinical scans to optimize protocols on how to best address a variety of illnesses. These trials have generated pilot data that has allowed Dr. Beyea and his team to translate it into more accessible information that can be presented to future funders. He is hopeful the Synaptive Medical project will soon become routine for patients around the world and impact the standard of care every day.
Over the course of his affiliation with the BRC, Dr. Beyea has fostered many collaborative and productive connections, bringing together groups of people with different expertise to work on a variety of research projects. Dr. David Volders (Neuroradiology), Dr. James Rioux (Imaging Physicist, Radiology) and Dr. Adela Cora (Neuroradiology) are key collaborators in the Synaptive MRI project. Another key connection, Dr. Beyea’s very first PhD student, Dr. Kimberly Brewer, went on to have a great career, which he followed, eventually convincing her to return to Nova Scotia to take a faculty position at Dalhousie University.
The Synaptive MRI team the day the first-ever neuroimages were taken using the new MRI.
Dr. Beyea’s advice to anyone considering working in the field of neuroscience is to “play in other people’s sandboxes,” citing the importance of exposing yourself to how people in different disciplines think, learning what others do, and asking people about the problems they are exploring and how they want to solve them. “The BRC is a great way to connect with other researchers and be exposed to a whole range of new perspectives and approaches that can impact your own work in a big way,” he says.