Anne Konkle
Anne TM Konkle
Associate professor

2008: Visiting scientist, Environmental Health Science Bureau, Toxicology Research Division, Health Canada
2007: Postdoctorate, Unité de recherches en neuroendocrinologie du comportement, Université de Liège (Belgium)
2007: Postdoctorate, University of Maryland (USA)
2003: PhD, Psychology, University of Ottawa
1997: BA, Psychology, University of Ottawa
1993: BSc, Biology, University of Ottawa

Room
MNT 407B (office)
RGN 1521 (lab)


Biography

Anne TM Konkle is an associate professor in the Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa, where she has been a faculty member since 2009. Trained as a behavioural neuroscientist, she completed her doctorate at the University of Ottawa, examining how environmental and genetic factors interact to shape depressive-like symptomatology in an animal model. She pursued postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Maryland in Baltimore (USA) and at the Université de Liège (Belgium), where she investigated steroidogenesis, rapid hormonal regulation and neurodevelopment. Before joining the University of Ottawa, she was a visiting scientist at Health Canada, where she studied the neurobehavioural effects of perinatal exposure to environmental contaminants. 

She served for five years as undergraduate program director at uOttawa’s Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences, where she contributed to curriculum innovation and academic program development within the School. She supervises and mentors undergraduate and graduate students across a range of interdisciplinary mental health research topics.

Professor Konkle has received many awards for her academic leadership, her research and teaching. Her current research program focuses on mental health across the lifespan, particularly among women, parents and diverse families during key life transitions. She is committed to public scholarship and knowledge translation, engaging with both the broader community, through her mental health blog and collaborations with organizations, and with young learners, through outreach that fosters early interest in the brain, behaviour and mental health.

Professor Konkle is accepting new students for thesis supervision. 

Research interests

  • Mental health across the lifespan, focusing on parents, partners and families during key life transitions
  • How social, environmental and digital factors shape mental health, with attention to equity and marginalization
  • Role of digital media, health literacy and misinformation in mental health experiences and support-seeking
  • Community-engaged and mixed-methods research with diverse and underserved populations

Research

Evolving from earlier work that centred on the offspring alone, and then examining the parent-infant dyad, Professor Konkle’s current research program adopts a lifespan approach to mental health. It focuses on how key life transitions, particularly those experienced by women and parents, from adolescence to the perinatal period through to midlife and menopause, shape wellbeing, identity and mental health trajectories for individuals and families.

She studies how the mental health of all parents and partners, across diverse family structures and gender identities, evolves during these transitions and interacts with social, biological, environmental and digital determinants of health, with particular attention to how health literacy and misinformation shape outcomes.

Using community-engaged, mixed-method and digital approaches, including social media analysis, netnography and scoping or systematic literature reviews, her work focuses on marginalized and structurally disadvantaged populations and aims to inform equitable mental health policy and practice across the lifespan. 

Learn more about Professor Konkle’s laboratory.

Publications

See Anne Konkle’s publications on PubMed, Google Scholar or ORCID.