Welcome to Dr. Melissa Perreault, who has recently joined the Ontario Veterinary College’s (OVC) Department of Biomedical Sciences.
Perreault completed her PhD in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neuroscience at McMaster University, where she focused on opioid-dopamine interactions in obsessive-compulsive disorder. She then began her postdoctoral training in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Toronto, spending some of this time as a visiting researcher in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh.
Perreault joined the University of Guelph in 2017 in the College of Biological Science’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and recently moved to OVC’s Department of Biomedical Sciences.
Her research takes an integrative approach to neuroscience research, using multiple advanced techniques which combine cell biology, animal behaviour and systems electrophysiology – a direct way to measure widescale neuronal function and detect functional abnormalities causing disease – in both cell cultures and living organisms. Perreault hopes her research will provide insights into the mechanisms of disease, with a particular focus on neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disease.
At present, her primary research focuses are autism, depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, with a specific interest in understanding sex differences in the mechanisms of disease and responses to potential treatments.
Perreault is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario (Algonquin heritage), and is heavily involved in Indigenous equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives at local, national and international levels. She is also an experienced scuba diver and likes to spend as much of her free time as possible in warm, tropical destinations.