Stephanie Debette MD, PhD

Stéphanie Debette, MD PhD, is Professor of Epidemiology/Public Health at the University of Bordeaux and practicing Neurologist at Bordeaux University Hospital.

She served as the current Director of the Bordeaux Population Health research center (University of Bordeaux – Inserm U1219) from 2022 to 2024. Prof. Debette has been leading large collaborative genomic and epidemiological studies on stroke, cognitive traits, and imaging markers of brain aging, especially cerebral small vessel disease, aiming to decipher the molecular mechanisms underlying brain aging and to improve prevention and treatment of stroke and dementia.

Prof. Debette has been leading a European Research Council grant, is the principal investigator of a large national investment for the future grant on cerebral small vessel disease (RHU-SHIVA) and has been coordinating or contributing to several European grants (JPND-BRIDGET, ENLIGHT-RISE…).

She was awarded the Claude Pompidou Foundation prize for dementia research, the scientific excellence award of the European Stroke Organization, and the National Order of Merit medal. A former Fulbright and Bettencourt-Schueller fellow and adjunct associate professor at Boston University, she was a visiting professor at Kyoto University. She serves on the research steering committee of the CHARGE consortium and chaired the International Stroke Genetics Consortium (ISGC) between 2017 and 2019. She also served as vice president for external relations at the University of Bordeaux (2018-22) and was the inaugural chair of the ENLIGHT European University Alliance board of directors (2019-22).