Tara Perrot is a Professor at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, at Dalhousie University. She received her BSc and Ph.D. degrees from Western University, and her PDF from the University of
Maryland School of Medicine. Her research interests are stress resilience, stress and diet interactions, the early life programming of the stress response, and the role of the gut-brain axis in the development of the stress response.
Nafissa Ismail is a Full Professor of Psychology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ottawa. She received her B.Sc. degree in Neuroscience (2002), her M.A. degree in Psychology (2005), and her Ph.D. in Psychology (2009) from Concordia University. She has been a post-doctoral fellow in Neuroendocrinology (2012) at the University of Massachusetts.
J. Alex Parker is an Assistant Professor at CHUM Research Center, University of Montréal. He earned his doctorate at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and has a broad background in genetics, with specific training and expertise in neuroscience, the science of aging and hereditary diseases. As a postdoctoral fellow at INSERM (France), he constructed some of the first C. elegans models for polyglutamine toxicity and identified the sirtuins as therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative disorders. Upon establishing his laboratory at the University of Montréal, Dr. Parker expanded his research to include amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. As a principal investigator or co-investigator on several previous ALS Canada, Canadian Institutes for Health Research, and Muscular Dystrophy Association-funded grants, he developed a second-generation chemical genetic platform with C. elegans that reduces the screening time from days to several hours. Dr. Parker’s knowledge in the field of neurodegeneration and experiences in neuroscience are uniquely suited to making significant contributions to understanding Parkinson’s
disease.
