Biography
Dr. Roy-Gagnon completed her PhD in Genetic Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2004, with postdoctoral fellowships at NIH and the University of Michigan. She also holds an MSc in statistics from Université Laval. Before joining the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa in 2013, she was an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Montreal and Scientist at Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center. Her main research interests lie in the development and optimal use of statistical methods for genetic epidemiological data, in order to address the many challenges faced in uncovering the genetic causes of complex diseases. Dr. Roy-Gagnon’s methodological work is done in the context of multidisciplinary collaborations, with current projects including studies on age-related eye disease and orofacial clefts. Her research program includes three themes: 1) the optimal utilization of genealogical resources in genetic epidemiology; 2) the development and utilization of statistical models to capture complex relationships of genetic effects; and 3) the use of quantitative traits as intermediate phenotypes or biomarkers for complex diseases.
Selected publications
1. Tran E, Rakesh M, Li G, Freeman EE, Roy-Gagnon M-H. Does the Association Between Eye Disease and Cognitive Function Vary by Genetic Risk of Cognitive Decline? An Analysis of Hospital Data With Replication in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci 2025 Jun 2;66(6):71. doi: 10.1167/iovs.66.6.71
2. Lelievre R, Rakesh M, Hysi PG, Little J, Freeman EE, Roy-Gagnon M-H. Gene-Environment and Metabolite-Environment Interaction Effects on Intraocular Pressure in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. BMC Genom Data 2025 Jan 29;26(1):10. doi: 10.1186/s12863-025-01301-w.
3. Lelievre R, Rakesh M, Hysi PG, Little J, Freeman EE, Roy-Gagnon M-H. Effect modification by sex of genetic associations of vitamin C related metabolites in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. Front Genet 2024 Jul 31:15:1411931. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2024.1411931
4. Rakesh M, Vézina H, Laprise C, Freeman EE, Burkett KM, Roy-Gagnon M-H. GENLIB: new function to simulate haplotype transmission in large complex genealogies. Bioinformatics. 2023 Mar 1;39(3):btad136. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btad136.
5. Freeman EE, Bastasic J, Grant A, Leung G, Li G, Buhrmann R, Roy-Gagnon M-H. Inverse Association of APOE ε4 and Glaucoma Modified by Systemic Hypertension: The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2022 Dec 1;63(13):9. doi: 10.1167/iovs.63.13.9.
6. Burkett KM, Rakesh M, Morris P, Vézina H, Laprise C, Freeman EE, Roy-Gagnon.M-H. Correspondence between genomic- and genealogical/coalescent-based inference of homozygosity by descent in large French Canadian genealogies. Front Genet. 2022 Jan 21;12:808829. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2021.808829
7. Tessier F, Fontaine-Bisson B, Lefebvre JF, El-Sohemy A, Roy-Gagnon M-H. Investigating Gene-Gene and Gene-Environment Interactions in the Association Between Overnutrition and Obesity-Related Phenotypes. Front Genet. 2019 Mar 4;10:151. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2019.00151. eCollection 2019. PubMed PMID: 30886629
8. Wang C, Roy-Gagnon M-H, Lefebvre JF, Burkett KM, Dubois L. Modeling gene-environment interactions in longitudinal family studies: a comparison of methods and their application to the association between the IGF pathway and childhood obesity. BMC Med Genet. 2019 Jan 11;20(1):9. doi: 10.1186/s12881-018-0739-x. PubMed PMID: 30634949