PhD
Director, Laboratory in the Genetics and Genomic Medicine of Inflammation
Canada Research Chair in Genetics and Genomic Medicine
Associate Professor of Medicine, Université de Montréal
John D. Rioux is an associate professor of medicine at Université de Montréal and the Montreal Heart Institute, where he works as a researcher and directs the Laboratory in the Genetics and Genomic Medicine of Inflammation. Since 2005, he has been the Canada Research Chair in Genetics and Genomic Medicine.
Dr. Rioux obtained his bachelor of science (BSc in Immunology) in 1987 and a doctorate of philosophy in medicine (PhD in Experimental Medicine) from McGill University in 1994. He then did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research in 1997. After this training, Dr. Rioux created a research group on the genetics and genomics of monogenic disorders and polygenic/complex disorders. In 2001, he became the director of the research group on inflammatory diseases at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research and then at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He was named an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2003, and in 2004 he became an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard until 2007.
The goal of his research is to discover the genetic risk factors of rare (monogenic) diseases and common (polygenic) diseases and to uncover the biological mechanisms that determine how these genetic variants influence the risk of developing these chronic diseases.Dr. Rioux is the founding member of four international consortia in the field of genetics. He has also written over 150 publications, including a number of articles in prestigious journals, such as Nature, Science, Nature Genetics, and The New England Journal of Medicine.
Genetics and genomics
Integrative biology
Inflammatory diseases
Cardiovascular diseases
Rare diseases in Quebec
- Canada Research Chair in Genetics and Genomic Medicine (with a focus on inflammation).
- 2007: His work was selected as one of Quebec's top ten discoveries for 2006 by Québec Science magazine (February 2007).
- 2007: Selected as one of eleven “stars” in the life sciences by Commerce magazine in a special issue published in April 2007.
- 2007: Recognized by Thomson Scientific for an article entitled “Genome-wide association study identifies new susceptibility loci for Crohn disease and implicates autophagy in disease pathogenesis” (Nature Genetics, April 2007) as one of the best scientific publications of the year in 2007.
- 2010: Received the Martial G. Bourassa Prize from the Montreal Heart Institute Foundation, which recognizes outstanding researchers and helps them develop and carry out basic research while acknowledging their contribution to scientific life at the Montreal Heart Institute.