Michael Meaney

Michael Meaney, CM, CQ, FRSC, PhD is a professor at McGill University specializing in biological psychiatry, neurology, and neurosurgery, who is primarily known for his research on stress, maternal care, and gene expression. His research team has "discovered the importance of maternal care in modifying the expression of genes that regulate behavioral and neuroendocrine responses to stress, as well as hippocampal synaptic development" in animal studies. The research has implications for domestic and public policy for maternal support and its role in human disease prevention and economic health.

Meaney is Associate Director of the Research Centre at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, Director of the Program for the Study of Behaviour, Genes and Environment, and James McGill Professor, Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University. He was named a "Most Highly Cited Scientist" in the area of neuroscience by the Institute for Scientific Information in 2007 and was also elected to the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) and named a Knight of the National Order of Quebec. For research on stress he has received a Senior Scientist Career Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) in 1997. He also, along with fellow researcher from the Douglas Institute Dr. Gustavo Turecki, was awarded the Scientist of the Year Award by Radio-Canada In 2011, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.

Animal Studies
Meaney pioneered in epigenetic research, especially in its relation to animal stress. His initial research focused on the relationship between early maternal care and stress response in rat pups. Meaney and colleagues found that pups taken outside of their maternal environment to be handled for 15 minutes a day had lower hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) responses than pups separated from their mothers for 3 hours a day and pups with no handling whatsoever. He hypothesized that glucocorticoid receptor (GR) density was involved in the HPA feedback loop. Meaney and colleagues later went on to confirm this feedback loop in research examining the effect of maternal care on GR expression. In this research, Meaney and colleagues separated mother rats into two groups: high licking and grooming (HLG) mothers and low licking and grooming (LLG) mothers. Pups of HLG mothers had a significantly greater density of GRs in their hippocampus than pups of LLG mothers. Further, this research—unlike previous research—established a causational relationship between maternal care and behaviroal epigenetic programing with cross fostering of pups by various mothers of differing maternal behaviors. The causal relationship between maternal care and epigenetic programing was further solidified by studying estrogen receptor expression in the medial pre-optic area of the brain. This research found that HLG mothers create pups that are also HLG mothers even with cross fostering. His early epigenetic research was instrumental in understanding the potential epigenetic research has for behavior in both animals and humans. Further, Meaney’s groundbreaking causational research in epigenetics is especially evident in his 2004 paper on GR expression as it is cited over 700 times by other authors.

Human Studies
Meaney’s earlier research was important in providing impetus for applied behavioral epigenetic research in humans as well. His first human research compared suicide subjects with a history of child abuse to suicide subjects without a history of child abuse. Similarly to his rat study on glucocorticoid receptors, Meaney found that abuse victims had less expression of hippocampal glucocorticoid receptors than both non-abused suicide victims and non-suicidal subjects. This suggests that childhood abuse alters the hippocampus in a way that is related to suicidal behavior.

Publications

 * Maternal programming of defensive responses through sustained effects on gene expression, Josie Diorio, and Michael J. Meaney, J Psychiatry Neurosci. 2007, July; 32(4): 275–284.


 * Promoter-Wide Hypermethylation of the Ribosomal RNA Gene Promoter in the Suicide Brain, Patrick O. McGowan, Aya Sasaki,Tony C. T. Huang,Alexander Unterberger, Matthew Suderman,Carl Ernst, Michael J. Meaney, Gustavo Turecki, and Moshe Szyf, PLoS ONE. 2008; 3(5): PLoS ONE. 2008; 3(5): e2085.
 * Maternal care effects on the hippocampal transcriptome and anxiety-mediated behaviors in the offspring that are reversible in adulthood, Ian C. G. Weaver, Michael J. Meaney, and Moshe Szyf, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 February 28; 103(9): 3480–3485.
 * Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior], Ian C G Weaver, Nadia Cervoni, Frances A Champagne, Ana C D’Alessio, Shakti Sharma1, Jonathan R Seckl, Sergiy Dymov, Moshe Szyf & Michael J Meaney, Nature Neuroscience 7, 847−854 (2004). (PDF, 643 kB)


 * Meaney, M.J. (2001) Maternal care, gene expression, and the transmission of individual differences in stress reactivity across generations. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24:1161-1192.

Books
Foundations in Social Neuroscience, John T. Cacioppo, Gary G. Berntson, Ralph Adolphs, C. Sue Carter, Richard J. Davidson, Martha K. McClintock, Bruce S. McEwen, Michael J. Meaney, Daniel L. Schacter, Esther M. Sternberg, Stephen S. Suomi and Shelley E. Taylor (Eds.) MIT Press, July 2002