Marie-Claude Audet is an associate professor at the School of Nutrition Sciences at the University of Ottawa, with a cross-appointment in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. She also holds an adjunct scientist appointment at the Institute of Mental Health Research (Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre) and an adjunct professorship at the Department of Neuroscience at Carleton University.
Professor Audet completed her PhD in psychology at Laval University. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Neuroscience at Carleton University, during which she examined the contribution of peripheral and brain inflammatory factors to stress-related disorders (depression, anxiety) using mouse models. Before joining the University of Ottawa in 2017, Professor Audet held a scientist position at The Royal’s Institute of Mental Health Research, where she established a research program on stress, mental health, and the gut microbiota-immune-brain axis, namely the inflammatory signalling routes between the intestinal environment and the brain that are modulated by microorganisms inhabiting the digestive tract.
Professor Audet’s current research aims to understand how stressful experiences across a lifespan may come to promote vulnerability to mental illnesses, with a specific focus on the gut microbiota-immune-brain axis. Her research examines the mechanisms by which gut bacteria communicate with the host brain under stressful conditions, and how this crosstalk may influence behaviour and mental health. Her lab also investigates the effects of lifestyle interventions, including dietary interventions and changes in physical activity levels, in preventing and/or attenuating symptoms of mental illnesses through the modulation of this axis. A major focus of her work is on the establishment of sex differences in relation to the microbiota, along with the inflammatory and behavioural effects of stressors and lifestyle interventions.
Professor Audet is accepting new students for thesis supervision.