Dr. Véronique Belzil is an Associate Professor of Neurology and Genetic Medicine at Vanderbilt Health, where she serves as the inaugural Director of the Live Like Lou ALS Research Center at Vanderbilt Health Honoring Gerald and Kim McCormick. She was recruited to Vanderbilt in 2024 to build the first ALS research center in Tennessee.

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The Center’s vision is to build a nationally visible, collaborative, open-science hub for ALS research that brings together complementary areas of expertise to accelerate discovery and translation. Its research framework integrates biological discovery, biomarker development, biospecimen science, multi-omics, disease modeling, data science, and community engagement, supported by infrastructure that connects mechanistic research with clinical translation. The Center brings together diverse molecular, cellular, computational, and clinical approaches to study ALS across multiple dimensions, with the goal of transforming scientific discoveries into meaningful advances for people living with ALS. Patient and community engagement is also an integral component of the Center’s vision, helping ensure that its research remains connected to the needs and priorities of the ALS community.

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Dr. Belzil obtained her bachelor’s degree in psychology from McGill University in 2003 and her master’s degree in psychology from Walden University in 2007. She subsequently pursued her PhD in neuroscience at the University of Montreal under the mentorship of Dr. Guy A. Rouleau, a leader in human genetics and ALS research, graduating in 2012.

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Following her doctoral studies, Dr. Belzil completed postdoctoral training at the Mayo Clinic in Florida under the mentorship of Dr. Leonard Petrucelli, a leading investigator in neurodegeneration. There, she established a translational research program focused on developing patient-centered approaches to better understand and address ALS and Alzheimer’s disease-related dementias, particularly frontotemporal dementia.

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Dr. Belzil’s independent research program seeks to better understand the complex biology underlying ALS and translate these discoveries into tools that can directly benefit patients. Two major areas of focus are the development of biomarker panels using accessible biospecimens and the investigation of how genetic and environmental factors interact through epigenetic mechanisms to influence disease, with a particular emphasis on idiopathic ALS. Her work integrates complementary molecular and computational approaches to capture the biological complexity and heterogeneity of ALS, while emphasizing strategies that can ultimately be translated into scalable approaches for disease detection, characterization, and longitudinal monitoring.