Dr. Álvaro Pascual-Leone is a world-renowned figure in Neurology. He has over 35 years of experience in the profession and extensive training in various fields within the specialty. Specifically, he is a global leader in the development of transcranial magnetic stimulation in the field of cognitive neuroscience and its therapeutic applications in Neurology, Psychiatry, and Neurorehabilitation.
Dr. Álvaro Pascual-Leone is a Professor of Neurology and Associate Dean of Clinical and Translational Research at Harvard Medical School. Additionally, he is the director of the Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation and Associate Director of the General Clinical Research Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Research on non-invasive brain stimulation seeks to discover new therapeutic options that are effective in cases of pain resistant to conventional pharmacological treatments. It also opens the door to techniques that could improve the treatment of neurological and neuropsychological diseases such as stroke or depression.
Dr. Pascual-Leone teaches us that the brain is an organ that constantly changes, learning new things at every moment while modifying others. He asserts that the brain is a machine of dreams, a machine of expectations, and that it must be exercised—thus, being a dreamer is beneficial. Pascual-Leone shows us that with imagination, the brain can be trained to perform specific tasks.
He has received numerous international awards and recognitions, including the Ramon y Cajal Award for Neuroscience (Spain), the Norman Geschwind Prize in Behavioral Neurology from the American Academy of Neurology, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation (Germany), and the Jean-Louis Signoret Prize from the Ipsen Foundation (France).
He is an elected member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences (Pharmacy).
His work also attracts significant public interest, and he engages in outreach by publishing articles in non-specialized press outlets—such as ‘Time’, ‘Newsweek’, ‘New Scientist’, and ‘National Geographic‘—and appearing in television and radio documentaries—such as ‘Scientific American’, ’60 Minutes’, ‘CNN’, ‘BBC’, ‘Discovery’, and ‘National Geographic’, among others.
In his lectures, Dr. Pascual-Leone also reflects on some of the effects of the pandemic and uncertainty on the central nervous system, chronic patients with degenerative conditions, and highlights the importance of learning from the experience to prevent the most adverse effects in possible future similar situations.
