Élyse Caron-Beaudoin is an Assistant Professor in environmental health at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She holds a graduate appointment at the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Through engaged scholarship, her lab, From Bench to Communities, develops transdisciplinary community-based research projects to assess the impacts of anthropogenic pressures on health and well-being by combining information across multiple levels of biological organization. Dr. Caron-Beaudoin holds a PhD in biology with a specialization in toxicology from the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique in Quebec. From 2018 to 2020, she was a CIHR-funded postdoctoral fellow at the Université de Montréal School of Public Health. During her fellowship, she investigated the associations between density and proximity to oil and gas wells and birth outcomes in Northeastern British Columbia and published the first Canadian epidemiological study focusing on this industry. She also instigated in partnership with First Nations from the region the first biomonitoring studies on exposure to environmental contaminants associated with this industry in Canada.
Her research interests are at the nexus of toxicology, molecular biology, exposure assessment, public and environmental health, and community-based research. With the support of various research grants, Dr. Caron-Beaudoin is currently leading multiple projects on 1) exposure to environmental contaminants associated with unconventional oil and gas operations; 2) mechanisms of toxicity (e.g., endocrine disruption, oxidative stress) associated with exposure to these contaminants; 3) associations between proximity to oil and gas wells and various health outcomes; 4) the role of airborne microbes and pollutants in the inflammatory response of asthma in Northern and Southern Canada; 5) the development of disease and sex-specific cellular models to study the contribution of environmental contaminants to disease etiology.