Niels Bergsland is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the State University of New York at Buffalo and serves as the Integration Director in BNAC and is part of BNAC’s leadership team.

Dr. Bergsland began working with BNAC as far back as the beginning of 2004 when he was undergraduate student at the University at Buffalo. Initially hired to help maintain the lab’s computer systems, he quickly became directly involved in the development of BNAC’s analysis pipelines and helped build out BNAC’s infrastructure for housing and processing the rapidly growing collection of MRI data. This eventually led to Dr. Bergsland pursuing a Master of Science in computer science from Nova Southeastern University.

For personal reasons, Dr. Bergsland moved to Pavia, Italy in the Summer of 2011. Despite the oceanic divide, he continued to work with BNAC. In collaboration with Fondazione Don Gnocchi in Milan, Italy, Dr. Bergsland completed a PhD in biomedical engineering at the Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Italy in March of 2016. His PhD thesis focused on the implementation and use of advanced MRI techniques to help better understand the pathophysiology of multiple sclerosis. His technical expertise in advanced imaging paired with a broad knowledge of underlying biology underlying CNS tissue damage along with its clinical relevance has led to an extensive scientific production as well as several national and international collaborations in the field of multiple sclerosis. Moreover, his work was recognized by other faculty members in the Department of Neurology at Buffalo and subsequently led to successful collaborations in other neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and stroke. In the beginning of 2023, Dr. Bergsland was recruited to join as a faculty member in the Department.

Dr. Bergsland’s recent work has focused on the role that the choroid plexus may play in both the initiation and progression of neurological disease. In the context of multiple sclerosis, he recently published in Neurology the manuscript “Association of Choroid Plexus Inflammation on MRI With Clinical Disability Progression Over 5 Years in Patients With Multiple Sclerosis”. Earlier this year, he was invited to give talks on the choroid plexus at both the annual Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ACTRIMS) meeting as well as the North American Imaging in MS Cooperative (NAIMS) workshop titled Imaging Barriers of the CNS. Furthermore, the University at Buffalo recently awarded funding to Dr. Bergsland to fund an undergraduate stipend to further this work and provide valuable research experience. In this capacity, Michael Georger, who is pursuing a bachelor’s of science degree in biomedical engineering before applying to medical school. Michael will begin working on better characterizing the temporal evolution of choroid plexus pathology in multiple sclerosis with Dr. Bergsland in Fall 2024. Dr. Bergsland is also serving as a mentor for Dr. Huasheng Wang’s PGY-4 research project, which will focus on the involvement of the choroid plexus in Parkinson’s disease.

“I very much enjoy mentoring those that are just beginning their research career. I hope that I can instill my own passion for research in those that I mentor and help them find their own path,” said Dr. Bergsland.

Beyond the BNAC and the University at Buffalo, Dr. Bergsland contributes to the larger scientific community by serving on the editorial boards of several journals, including Associate Editor for the Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Section Editor for multiple sclerosis for the Journal of Neuroimaging, as well as being a member of the MSBase MRI steering committee.

Beyond his academic and scientific work, Dr. Bergsland enjoys spending time with his wife and their three children as well as traveling and reading a wide variety of both fiction and non-fiction.