Michael Meaney
Michael J. Meaney, born in 1951, is a professor at McGill University who studies biological psychiatry, neurology, and neurosurgery. He is best known for his research on stress, maternal care, and how genes are expressed. In animal studies, his team showed that the level of maternal care can change the expression of genes that control stress responses and the development of certain brain circuits in the hippocampus. This work suggests that early experiences can shape biology and may influence how public policy supports maternal care to promote health.
Meaney holds several leadership roles at McGill and related institutes. He is the associate director of the Research Centre at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, the director of the Program for the Study of Behaviour, Genes and Environment, and a James McGill Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology and Neurosurgery.
He has received many honors for his work, including being named a Most Highly Cited Scientist in neuroscience in 2007, election to the Royal Society of Canada, and becoming a Knight of the National Order of Quebec. He earned a Senior Scientist Career Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research in 1997 and, with Dr. Gustavo Turecki, was named Scientist of the Year by Radio-Canada. In 2011, he became a member of the Order of Canada. By 2019, he had published hundreds of papers and had a high h-index, indicating many influential citations.
Meaney’s research focuses on stress and epigenetics—the idea that experiences can change how genes work without altering the DNA sequence. Early work looked at how maternal care affects how rat pups respond to stress. In classic experiments, pups handled for 15 minutes a day showed lower stress hormone responses than pups separated from their mothers for longer periods or not handled at all. He linked these differences to the density of glucocorticoid receptors in the hippocampus, and showed a causal link by cross-fostering pups between high- and low-care mothers.
He also studied how maternal care influences other brain systems, including estrogen receptor expression in the brain’s preoptic area, with similar patterns. The findings from these animal studies have guided human research, suggesting that early experiences can shape later stress responses and behavior.
Meaney’s work extends to humans. His early human research compared suicidal individuals with and without a history of childhood abuse and found that abuse was associated with lower expression of glucocorticoid receptors in the hippocampus, supporting the idea that childhood experiences can leave lasting, brain-based marks linked to risk for depression or suicide.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 16:04 (CET).