Carlos Muñoz-Neira

Biography

Dr Carlos Muñoz Neira is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Engineering Sciences at Universidad de O’Higgins, Rancagua, Chile. His research focuses on integrating neuropsychological assessments with neuroimaging to study cognitive decline and different forms of dementia.

Carlos recently completed postdoctoral training in neuroimaging analysis at SITRaN (Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience), a globally recognised research centre that is part of the Division of Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield. During this time, he was also a research visitor at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. Carlos holds a PhD in Translational Health Sciences and an MSc in Neuropsychology awarded by the University of Bristol. Additionally, he is a Clinical Psychologist, having graduated from Universidad de Chile.

After living for nearly a decade in England, Carlos returned to Chile to further develop his lines of research and strengthen local and international collaborations. Before moving to the United Kingdom, he worked as a Neuropsychologist at the Neurology Department of Hospital del Salvador, a renowned public hospital in Santiago, Chile that is affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine at Universidad de Chile.

Throughout his career, Carlos has combined clinical and research work, as evidenced by his publications. In Chile, most of his research covered validations of neuropsychological tests for Spanish-speaking populations with dementia. In England, his lines of research have involved the use of neuroimaging in English-speaking cohorts with dementia and young subjects from China with a genetic predisposition to dementia. Carlos’ doctoral studies were devoted to investigating the neural correlates of altered insight in frontotemporal dementia. Complementary to this, his postdoctoral training examined structural and functional brain differences in young carriers and non-carriers of the APOE ε4 allele, which is a genotype associated with an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in later life.

Carlos is currently investigating the neural correlates of impaired insight into diagnosis and/or symptoms in an English-speaking cohort that includes patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as cognitively healthy older adults. At the same time, Carlos is open to discussions on potential collaborations with those who share common research interests.