Symposia Speakers

Dr. Caroline Menard is an Associate Professor at Université Laval Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and affiliated with the CERVO Brain Research Center in Quebec City (Canada). Her research program aims to shed light on the biological mechanisms underlying stress vulnerability vs resilience, with help of state-of-the-art photonic technology, in order to develop innovative treatments and identify biomarkers of mood disorders. Their multidisciplinary approach combines behavioral experiments with functional, cellular, molecular, and imaging studies and validation of rodent findings in human samples. Her team showed that chronic stress exposure promotes blood-brain barrier hyperpermeability leading to passage of circulating inflammatory mediators into the brain and the establishment of depressive behaviors. These changes occur in a sex-specific manner which may contribute to sex differences in depression prevalence, symptoms and treatment responses. Dre. Menard won several prizes and awards, and her work was published in Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Communications, Nature Medicine, Neuron, PNAS, Trends in Neuroscience and Biological Psychiatry.