DrSamuel Klistorner

Dr Samuel Klistorner is an MS Australia Fellow and early-career investigator at the University of Sydney's Brain and Mind Centre, Faculty of Medicine and Health. His research program sits at the intersection of quantitative MRI, computational image analysis, and the biology of treatment-resistant disease in multiple sclerosis.

His core focus is smouldering inflammation, a chronic, insidious disease process that drives disability accumulation in MS yet remains invisible to routine clinical imaging. Modern disease-modifying therapies have largely controlled acute inflammation, but patients continue to deteriorate slowly between relapses, and clinicians currently lack reliable tools to detect, monitor, or target this process. Samuel's program develops the MRI biomarkers and computational pipelines that make smouldering pathology measurable at scale.

During his PhD, he developed the LEAP (Lesion Estimation and Analysis Pipeline), a validated tool for quantifying chronic lesion tissue expansion (CLTE), a process of slow, year-on-year volumetric growth of established MS lesions driven by persistent microglial activation. His work has established CLTE as one of the most sensitive longitudinal markers of smouldering lesion activity in development, with uptake across approximately 10 research groups internationally. Subsequent work has extended the biomarker portfolio to include paramagnetic rim lesion analysis, TSPO PET-validated microglial activation, and novel cross-sectional approaches to lesion instability applicable to existing registries and completed trial datasets.

Samuel holds nationally competitive fellowships from MS Australia and the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF EMCR Award), and contributes as investigator across multiple active funded programs. His work is supported by unique longitudinal datasets, including the MAD-MS cohort (250 patients, up to 12 years of annual 3T MRI) and the MSBase international registry, and by active international collaborations across the University of Turku (Finland), University of Nottingham, University of Cambridge, and Charité Berlin.

He is supervised by Prof. Michael Barnett (Brain and Mind Centre). His broader ambition is to build a translational biomarker program that extends beyond MS toward neuroinflammatory disease more broadly, engineering measurement tools for disease processes that currently remain hidden from clinical view.

Samuel is actively building his research team and welcomes enquiries from prospective HDR students and research collaborators.