Collaborative Network
Franco-Canadian Collaboration
The Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University and St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding ("MOU") with the world-renown Pasteur Institute in Paris to create a partnership and possibly establish a Canadian Pasteur Institute in Hamilton. To achieve this, the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences is currently setting up a program of collaborative activities including student exchanges, exchanges of professors, collaborative research (the respective research forces are very complementary) and other joint initiatives, sharing expertise and resources.
The involvement of the French Embassy has also opened other opportunities for collaboration with the main institutes of clinical and fundamental neuroscience in France such as the excellent Neurocampus of Bordeaux.
Our department was awarded from the university a very important and highly competitive fund to support the establishment of the collaboration. The 2019 Strategic Alignment Fund (SAF) for an amount of 450,000 CAD over three years will allow us to work on the next steps of the Franco-Canadian collaboration for clinical neurosciences research and education.
February 2019
The department had the pleasure of welcoming Drs. Pierre-Marie Lledo, Chantal Henry and Aroldo Ayub Dargel from Institut Pasteur, and Xavier Grosmaitre, as well as Hugo Lequertier of the French Embassy and Consulate in Canada and other partners at McMaster universities and research institutes.
The highly successful visit included meetings with representatives from the St. Joseph's Health Systems Council, a tour of the new West Fifth Hospital Laboratory, home to the future McMaster - St. Joseph Center for Clinical Neuroscience, and a meeting of all interested parties including the City of Hamilton (Carolynn Reid).
September 2019
Visit from the Kapczinski Lab to the Pasteur Institute.
With the excellent Dr. Gérard Eberl’s team at Pasteur Institute.
In front of the father of immunology, Elie Metchnikoff, at Pasteur Institute.
January 2020
Two wonderful days of presentation, strategic planning and exchanges were organized at St Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton and McMaster University with Dr. Pierre-Marie Lledo (Pasteur Inst.), Dr. Gérard Eberl (Pasteur Instit.), Dr. Lucile Capuron (Univ. Bordeaux), Dr. Muriel Darnaudéry (Univ. Bordeaux) and Dr. Ronald McKay (Lieber Institute for Brain Development, Baltimore) and many other scientists and colleagues from McMaster and St Joe's.
January 2021
A prestigious research award, the Desmarest Prize, has been granted to Dr. Kapczinski by the Pierre Deniker Foundation and Alzheimer Foundation in France for the project "Inflammatory mediators of the progression of severe psychiatric disorders into cognitive impairment and dementia."
The award ceremony will be held online during the national Brain Awareness Week organized in March 2021 by the French Neuroscience Society ('Société des Neurosciences').
This is a key accomplishment in the ongoing Franco-Canadian research collaboration with the Pasteur Institute.
July 2021
The Kapczinski laboratory research team had the pleasure of participating in the three-day Universite de Bourdeaux neuropsychiatry summer school event. Here our group was able to both gain knowledge and share our research on dimensional approaches in psychiatry, preclinical models, and methods to measure immune markers.