Ninad Aithal

I am an MSc student in the Integrated Program in Neuroscience at McGill University, working in the ORIGAMI Lab at The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute) under Jean-Baptiste Poline. I joined the lab as a part-time research assistant in November 2025 and started the MSc in August 2026. My research builds generalizable models of Alzheimer’s disease progression from longitudinal PET and MRI collected across many cohorts, using disease-course modelling and medical imaging foundation models to forecast cognitive decline, including in federated settings where data stay at participating sites.

Before McGill, I worked on brain aging and cognitive impairment at the Indian Institute of Science: first at the Centre for Brain Research with Neelam Sinha, on non-linear and topological fMRI biomarkers of mild cognitive impairment, then in the Vision and AI Lab on a cross-population brain-age study with collaborators at Stanford Medicine. I then spent a year as a Research Engineer at Niramai Health Analytix, adapting vision foundation models to thermal imaging and taking a clinical screening platform from the cloud onto edge hardware and into a hospital.

I am a maintainer of Nipoppy, an open framework for reproducible neuroimaging workflows; I built its telemetry module and led its deployment at NIMHANS, India, for a clinical cohort study. I also build open tools for neuroscience, most notably NeuroDataHub, an open-source catalogue and downloader for 50 public neuroimaging datasets and 50,000+ brain scans, used by 1,100+ visitors from 50+ countries.

I’m broadly interested in foundation modeling for neuroimaging and in federated learning across imaging sites — bringing models to data spread over hospitals and cohorts, so studies can scale without centralizing sensitive scans.