Mapping Brain Iron Across the Lifespan with Quantitative MRI

Iron is essential for brain function. It supports cellular metabolism and is critical for the formation of myelin, the insulating sheath that enables efficient neural communication. At the same time, excessive iron can promote oxidative damage and has been implicated in several neurological diseases. Understanding how iron changes in the human brain across the lifespan is therefore central to understanding both healthy aging and disease vulnerability.

For centuries, knowledge about brain iron has relied largely on post-mortem microscopy, requiring invasive tissue extraction. Today, advances in quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI) make it possible to map iron content non-invasively in the living human brain. These methods open new opportunities to study how brain iron changes across development and aging, and how these changes vary between individuals.

In this talk, I will present how qMRI can be used to measure brain iron in vivo across the adult lifespan. I will show that brain iron accumulates slowly during aging and discuss emerging evidence for differences in aging trajectories between males and females. These findings provide a new window into the biological processes that shape brain aging.

Dr. Shir Filo

Shir Filo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, working in the Department of Neurophysics. She completed her PhD in the direct program in computational neuroscience at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also earned her BSc in Physics and Biology.
Her research focuses on developing biophysical models of quantitative MRI to study brain tissue microstructure, with the goal of better understanding brain development and aging. She has received several awards and fellowships, including the Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship, the Council for Higher Education Award for Outstanding Postdoctoral Women Researchers, the Rothschild Fellowship, and the Azrieli Fellowship.