Dr. Marie-Ève Tremblay

Introduction

Dr. Marie-Ève Tremblay is a Canadian neuroscientist at the School of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Health, of the University of Victoria. She obtained her PhD in 2009 when microglia, resident immune cells of the brain, had largely unknown functions in the absence of pathological challenge. Her research has contributed to stimulating a paradigm shift in the neuroscience and neuroimmunology community by revealing that microglia are always active. They play beneficial roles in the healthy brain, which can also become pathological in contexts of disease. This research has involved the supervision of over 125 undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral fellows, research assistants and associates. Dr. Tremblay has been invited to present her research over 200 times as seminars and lectures in symposia, specialized courses and workshops, with a majority on the international scene. She has over 250 publications, not including preprints, that were cited over 24,000 times, corresponding to an h-index of 75 (Google Scholar). In 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025, Clarivate ranked Dr. Tremblay among the top 1% of most highly cited researchers across fields. She is the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Neurobiology of Healthy Cognitive Aging and an Elected College Member of the Royal Society of Canada. She is Editor-in-Chief of the recently launched Glial Health Research journal published by Elsevier, and former Specialty Chief Editor of the Non-Neuronal Cells section of Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience. Her research investigates the outcomes of genetic variants and modifiable risk factors for disease on microglial health along an aging trajectory.

Research

The microglia field is growing exponentially. This research mainly pertains to their many physiological and immunological roles, exerted through their interactions with other brain cells (neuronal and non-neuronal), and the underlying molecular mechanisms. 

In this work, microglia are increasingly shown to be diverse, comprised of different states that perform specialized functions. This is a discovery that promises to provide selective targets for therapeutic intervention across a wide range of disease conditions in which microglia were found to be implicated throughout life.

At this stage in the field, it is especially important to unravel how genetic variants and modifiable risk factors for disease influence these various microglial states and their functions (through their interactions with other brain cells, neuronal and non-neuronal). The Tremblay lab is using complementary approaches that assess changes in microglial metabolism, ultrastructure, morphology, and molecular signature to study the roles of different microglial states across contexts of health and disease. Therapeutic strategies to normalize microglial states, pharmacological and non-pharmacological, are investigated within the perspective of lifestyle medicine. Sex differences are also examined.

This research is paving the way toward studying in humans using longitudinal brain imaging microglial states, including stressed and dark microglia, as biomarkers for diagnosis, disease progression and treatment response.

People

•  Current lab members and alumni