Professor Louise Arseneault is taking a developmental approach to investigate how the consequences of violence begin in childhood and persist to mid-life, by studying bullying victimisation and child maltreatment. She also studies the impact of social relationships including social support, loneliness and social isolation 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.

Professor Arseneault completed her PhD in biomedical sciences at the University of Montreal and moved to the UK for a post-doctoral training at 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).

For 5 years, she was the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Mental Health Leadership Fellow. Her fellow role with the ESRC included providing intellectual leadership and strategic advice in the priority area of mental health. It was a broad agenda including engaging research communities, promoting collaborations, advocating for mental health research, championing the co-design and co-production of research and providing advice to the ESRC and other research councils. She provided advice on how social science research can best address the challenges that mental health poses for our society, communities and individuals.

She created and developed the Catalogue of Mental Health Measures, a web platform aimed at optimising the uptake of existing mental health and wellbeing measures collected by UK-based longitudinal studies. It provides detailed information about these measures, and it features biological, psychosocial and environmental data. Louise also led the Landscaping International Longitudinal Datasets project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, to scope the world for longitudinal datasets with potential for transformative mental health research.

Professor Arseneault was elected as Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in May 2018, She joined 47 new Fellows, who have been elected for their outstanding contributions to biomedical and health science, leading research discoveries, and translating developments into benefits for patients and the wider society. She was also conferred Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2019.

Research interests

• Developmental/longitudinal research
• Environmental risk and protective factors
• Social relationship and impact on the course of mental (ill) health
• Development and course of mental health problems
• Data discoverability

 

Research groups

DATAMIND - The Hub for Mental Health Informatics Research Development, is funded by The Medical Research Council and is delivered in partnership with Health Data Research UK. 

Health Research Data (HDR) UK – The National Institute for health data science