Ilana Caro, a young BPH-ELEANOR researcher, was honoured at the last meeting of the CHARGE Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology Consortium in Washington on 22 June 2025. This Early-Career Achievement 2025 prize rewards young scientists who, in the early years of their careers, stand out for the quality and impact of their work in the field of cardiovascular disease and ageing.

The jury, made up of members of the consortium taking part in the Investigator Meetings, recognised the originality and international scope of Ilana Caro’s contributions. Her work opens up new prospects for improving our understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms, encouraging the development of innovative approaches to the management of neurovascular diseases and preventing strokes, cognitive decline and dementia.

International recognition

Receiving the Early-Career Achievement Award places Ilana Caro among the most promising up-and-coming figures in research into these diseases, which represent a major health burden. It is an important milestone in her career and a source of inspiration for our entire scientific community.

This distinction also raises the profile of research into diseases of the small cerebral vessels in Bordeaux within the BPH, the RHU SHIVA and the ‘Institute VBHI , with which Ilana is associated, and testifies to the growing excellence of our teams in this field.

In the course of her research training, Ilana Caro developed expertise at the interface of vascular biology and genomics, as part of her thesis in Public Health-Epidemiology entitled ‘Deciphering the molecular signature of cerebral small vessel disease with a focus on multi-omics biomarkers’, carried out at the BPH in the BPH-ELEANOR team under the supervision of Pr. Stéphanie Debette.

The consortium CHARGE (Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology) was set up to facilitate meta-analyses of genome-wide association studies (GWAS).

The organisation is based on several large-scale, well-phenotyped longitudinal epidemiological cohort studies.

These cohorts have a large collection of genomic data as well as repeated measures of risk factors and indicators of cardiovascular disease in more than 50,000 multi-ethnic participants.