Fabrice Jollant, MD, PhD
Associate Researcher, Douglas Research Centre
Adjunct Professor, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University
Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Université de Paris, France
Links
Expertise: Suicide, suicidal behaviour, mood disorders, bipolar disorders, depressive disorders, neuropsychology, decision-making, social cognition, emotions, cerebral neuroimaging, fMRI
Profile
Fabrice Jollant, M.D., Ph.D., has been an assistant professor and psychiatrist at the Faculty of Medicine of Montpellier (France) and a guest research associate at the Institute of Psychiatry of London. In September 2010, he joined the McGill Group for Suicide Studies (MGSS) at the Douglas Institute. He worked at the Douglas Institute as a researcher and psychiatrist until December 2015 before going back to France. He is now adjunct professor at McGill University since January 2016. In September 2017, he took a position of full professor of psychiatry at Université Paris-Descartes and Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne in Paris (France), from where he continues to work with the Douglas Institute.
His research focuses primarily on the cognitive and cerebral bases of vulnerability to suicide. This involves the, in vivo, measurement of processes that could indicate specific stress sensitivity factors. For this, Fabrice Jollant uses neuropsychology and functional neuroimaging. In this way, he has highlighted the fact that people with suicidal vulnerability make disadvantageous decisions compared to patients in a control group and healthy controls.
In addition, Fabrice Jollant led the first functional neuroimaging study of suicidal vulnerability, identifying several dysfunctional cerebral regions in patients with a history of suicidal behaviour. He recently proposed the first neurocognitive model of suicidal vulnerability, on which his current research is based. The general objective is to improve our understanding of pathophysiological mechanisms involved in the suicidal process. This preliminary step is crucial to defining stronger predictive markers and more effective preventive strategies. These studies are currently being done at the Douglas in collaboration with several researchers at the Institute and research groups outside the country (France, United States, United Kingdom).
Dr. Jollant is also principal investigator of the Palawan Suicide Project with Professor Charles MacDonald, anthropologist: https://mgss.ca/palawan-suicide-project.
Dr Jollant also currently works on the identification of treatment for suicidal ideas, and on epidemiological studies on large French administrative databases (with Pr. C. Quantin and Dr. A. Vuagnat, France)
Biography:
- Assistant professor (2010-2015): McGill University, Montréal
- Attending psychiatrist and researcher (2010-2015): Douglas Mental Health University Institute, Montréal
- Adjunct professor (since 2016): McGill University, Montréal
- Full professor (since sept 2017): Université Paris-Descartes and Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne, Paris, France
Former students:
- Marlène Villaplana (MSc Student)
- Adam Kendall (MSc Student)
- Alexandra Hoehne (MSc Student)
- Lisa Kluen (MSc Student)
- Yang Ding (PhD Student)
- Stéphane Richard-Devantoy (Post-doc)
- Anthony Gifuni (PhD Student)
