Claire-Dominique Walker

Dr. Claire-Dominique Walker obtained her PhD from the University of Geneva, Switzerland and trained both at the Salk Institute and at the University of California San Francisco before joining McGill University and the Douglas Institute in Mental Health. She is currently Professor in the Dept of Psychiatry and Anatomy & Cell Biology at McGill University. The focus of her research is to understand the long term consequences of early stress and environmental challenges on the development of the brain and adult vulnerability to pathologies. Her current work examines how the neuronal pathways that regulate stress responses and reward systems in the offspring are modified by maternal nutrition and endocannabinoids, leading to increased susceptibility to mood disorders and metabolic diseases. To parallel the condition of human pre-term infants subjected to early pain, Dr Walker has also developed an animal model of neonatal exposure to repeated pain to investigate long term effects on pain sensitivity, behavior and brain morphology. Her research interests have expanded to examine the role of infants on maternal stress responsiveness in order to better understand the reciprocal nature of the mother-infant dyad.