Julie Staals

Professor

Prof.  Julie Staals is working as a clinical neurologist at Maastricht UMC+. Her specialisation is neurovascular diseases. She has obtained her medical degree at Maastricht University. Afterwards, she did a parallel tract in neurology training and PhD research project, both were finished in 2009. In 2013 she did a short research fellowship at the Brain Research Imaging Center in Edinburgh, UK. Her research focus is on clinical studies in cerebral small vessel disease, mainly the effects of hypertension, the rol of endothelial function, blood-brain barrier and the neurovascular unit, advanced imaging, and the cognitive consequences of this disease. She developed the ‘total SVD score’, a highly cited score for MRI severity of cerebral small vessel disease. Other clinical research topics are intracerebral haemorrhage and acute stroke treatments.

Julie Staals  has been appointed as professor 'Neurovascular disease' as of 1 April 2024. Julie is neurologist at Maastricht UMC+ and leader of the stroke clinic. Her research aims at unravelling the pathophysiology of cerebral small vessel disease, a common ageing-related disease leading to stroke and dementia, which falls within the research programs of both CARIM and MHeNS. Furthermore she is involved in clinical studies on the very successfull acute endovascular stroke treatment. The inaugural lecture will follow later.

She is currently involved in:
SVDs@target, a EU Horizon2020 multicenter project on mechanisms in cerebral small vessel disease (www.svds-at-target.eu)

CRUCIAL, a EU Horizon2020 multicenter project on microvascular rarefaction in vascular cognitive impairment and heart failure (www.crucial-project.eu)

MRCLEAN trials, acute clinical stroke trials aiming at improving outcome in endovascular treatment (www.contrast-consortium.nl)