Louise Arseneault’s research focuses on how the consequences of violence on mental health and functioning begin in childhood and persist to mild-life by studying bullying victimization and child maltreatment. Louise also studies the impact of social relationships including social support, social isolation and loneliness on mental health. Her research aims are to answer questions relevant to psychology and psychiatry by harnessing and combining three different research approaches: developmental research, epidemiological methods and genetically-sensitive designs. Louise’s work incorporates social as well as biological measurements across the life span.

Louise completed her PhD in biomedical sciences at the University of Montreal and moved to the UK for a post-doctoral training at the King’s College London. She has been working with well-known longitudinal cohorts such as the Montreal Longitudinal Cohorts, the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study and the National Child Development Survey (NCDS).

As part of her Mental Health Leadership Fellowship with the ESRC (2016-2022), she created and developed the Catalogue of Mental Health Measures, a platform designed to provide easy access to information about the mental health measures included in British longitudinal studies. The Catalogue’s aims are to maximize the uptake of existing data and facilitate mental health research. Louise is part of the leadership team of DATAMIND and leads the FAIR Curated Mental Health Data Core Activity. Funded by Wellcome, Louise had also been mapping the world’s large, longitudinal datasets that have the potential to answer questions related to early intervention in anxiety, depression and/or psychosis.

Louise Arseneault was elected as Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2018 and she was appointed Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2019.