Dr. J Alberto Neder is a respirologist and physician scientist with a broad interest in the field of clinical respiratory physiology. Dr. Neder and his associates have been successful in elucidating the mechanisms driving the key complaints of patients suffering the devastating consequences of chronic cardiopulmonary diseases: breathlessness and exercise intolerance. These lines of research have the ultimate goals to develop and test novel diagnostic approaches and pharmacological/non-pharmacological interventions to improve patients’ quality of life.
Dr. Neder has been a senior author in over 300 peer-reviewed papers and has authored many book chapters on respiratory and exercise physiology, pulmonary rehabilitation, and integrated care in chronic respiratory diseases. His book on "Clinical Exercise Physiology: Theory and Practice" is widely used as a reference text in his home country of Brazil and remains the only Portuguese-written textbook on the field. He has extensive experience in training research personnel from undergraduate to post-doctoral levels. He has been ranked within the top 0.1% most productive researchers in the field of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) worldwide in 2023 (Expertscape™).
After completing his doctoral thesis in Medicine at the Federal University of Sao Paulo (UNIFESP), Brazil, Dr. Neder underwent two post-doctoral training periods in exercise pathophysiology at St. George’s Hospital, University of London, England, and University of Glasgow, Scotland. Dr. Neder returned to Sao Paulo in 2002 to establish a centre of clinical exercise physiology at UNIFESP which has been consistently funded by peer-reviewed grants. In the following 6 years, he proceeded through several academic ranks to secure the position of "Professor Titular" (the top rank in the Brazilian academia) of Respiratory Medicine at UNIFESP. Having spent 3 years as the Head of the Respiratory Division at this University, Dr. Neder was recruited through SEAMO’s New Clinician Scientist Program to be appointed as Professor in the Division of Respirology, Queen’s University in 2013. He was awarded a CFI Leaders Opportunity Fund grant to establish a state-of-the-art Laboratory of Clinical Exercise Physiology (LACEP) at Kingston General Hospital. This laboratory has allowed Dr. Neder to substantially expand the spectrum of his research endeavors to the population of patients with combined cardio-respiratory and metabolic diseases.
Effective April 2023, the LACEP was amalgamated with the Division’s Respiratory Investigation Unit (RIU), creating a research centre with unique technical capabilities, such as small airways function, non-invasive and invasive lung mechanics, assessment of neuromuscular fatigue with magnetic stimulation, muscle and cerebral oxygenation by near-infrared spectroscopy, amongst others. More recently, Dr. Neder has expanded his interests in joining clinical physiology with cutting-edge respiratory functional imaging with the intent to advance the knowledge on the structure-function relationship of the lungs in health and disease.
Dr. Neder runs a busy clinical service focused on COPD, is the Medical Director of Hotel Dieu Hospital’s Pulmonary Function Tests Laboratory and is the Director of Providence Care Hospital’s Pulmonary Rehabilitation Program. He was a member of the 2014 Respiratory Disease Task Force, which updated the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) clinical practice parameters for pulmonary function studies. Dr. Neder’s clinical and teaching interests include COPD, COPD-heart failure overlap, cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation, pulmonary hypertension & pulmonary vascular disease, advanced lung function testing and cardiopulmonary exercise tests.