This is a recruitment seminar: Dr. Deneault is a candidate for a position as an Assistant or Associate Professor (Research) in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University.

Speaker: Eric Deneault, PhD

Research Associate, Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital, McGill University

Speaker Bio: Eric Deneault works as a research associate at the Neuro at McGill University with Dr Thomas Durcan. His post-doc training was completed in 2018 at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto with Dr Stephen Scherer, working with human iPSCs and CRISPR editing to model neurological disorders. He was awarded the Autism Research Training program offered by the CIHR, as well as the Banting post-doctoral fellowship. Eric had previously completed his graduate studies with Dr Guy Sauvageau at University of Montreal, where he received the award of Best Thesis in Health Sciences.

Talk Abstract: My research involves the use of patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and derived neurons as a laboratory model to study the direct genetic causes of neurological disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD). An important aspect of my research involves developing new gene editing pipelines with novel clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) technology, which has made the genome almost as editable as a simple piece of text, ensuring that any base pair in almost any location within the genome can be modified or edited. Isogenic pairs of cell lines, that differ exclusively in the mutation of interest, represents the optimal way to assign direct causality to any phenotype, and to shed light on fundamental molecular questions regarding genetically-complex neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders such as ASD and PD.

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