The gut Microbiome in Mental Illness: Hope or Hype

Dr. Valerie Taylor

Dr. Valerie Taylor is a Professor and the Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Calgary. She completed a Bachelors of Medical Science and graduated from medical school at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She subsequently completely her residency training in Psychiatry and a PhD in Medical Science and two research fellowships from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, an Improving and Driving Excellence across Sectors (IDEAS) Ontario certification in Quality Improvement, a certificate from the Mental Health Commission of Canada for their Promotion of Activated Research and Knowledge (SPARK) Training Program, a Rotman Advanced Health Leadership diploma and a certificate from the Haskayne School of Business as part of their inaugural “ financial feminist” cohort. Prior to coming to Calgary, she was the chief of Psychiatry at Women’s College Hospital and the chief of Adult Health Services at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health and lead of the division of Equity, Gender and Population at the University of Toronto.

Her academic focus has been on the area of medical psychiatry, especially the interplay of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease and mental illness. For the last 5 year, she has also worked on the gut brain axis and the area of the gut microbiome. She is one of the only funded researcher examining the therapeutic effects of fecal transplant as a treatment for mental illness and she currently has 4 novel clinical trials looking at modifying the gut microbiome to treat mood disorders and runs the largest biological neuroscience microbiome repository in North America. She has over 180 peer reviewed publications and funding from a variety of national and international funding agencies.