Cyprien Rivier, MD, MSc

Dr. Cyprien Rivier is an Instructor in the Department of Neurology at Yale School of Medicine and inaugural Ralph L. Sacco Scholar in Brain Health. He completed his MD and a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Geneva before pursuing postdoctoral training in epidemiology and population genetics at Yale.

Dr. Rivier's research focuses on cerebrovascular aging: the progressive accumulation of subclinical vascular injury in the brain. The primary manifestation of this process is cerebral small vessel disease, a buildup of damage that precedes stroke, cognitive decline, and vascular dementia by years or even decades. By integrating multi-omics methods with epidemiology and neuroimaging, Dr. Rivier aims to detect this damage in its earliest phases and identify individuals on accelerated aging trajectories, enabling earlier intervention.

Funded by the American Heart Association, the Yale Center for Brain and Mind Health, and the Yale Pepper Center, he pursues this goal through several complementary approaches. He is developing novel connectivity metrics derived from structural brain imaging to capture network-level disruptions caused by vascular injury. He is also constructing a biological clock trained on cerebrovascular outcomes to quantify an individual's cerebrovascular age using routine clinical biomarkers. His work also leverages genetic epidemiology and causal inference to establish mechanistic links between modifiable risk factors and cerebrovascular outcomes.