- Academic Life
Four new specialists join the ranks of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique.
The varied backgrounds of these new faculty members fit perfectly with the mission of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), which focuses on interdisciplinary research and training to provide solutions to major societal challenges.
Professors Miceline Mésidor and Ryan Pardy are joining the faculty of the Armand-Frappier Santé Biotechnologie Research Centre in Laval, Professor Anne Ola will continue her work at the Eau Terre Environnement Research Centre in Quebec City, while Professor Zakaria Abou El Houda is joining the Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre in Varennes.
Zakaria Abou El Houda: artificial intelligence for safety
Professor Zakaria Abou El Houda is a computer engineer who trained at the École nationale des sciences appliquées in Marrakesh. He obtained a master’s degree in computer networks from the Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier University in France.
Professor Abou El Houda obtained a doctorate in computer science from the Université de Montréal and a doctorate in computer engineering from the University of Technology of Troyes.
Zakaria Abou El Houda is a member of the INRS-UQO Joint Research Unit on cybersecurity. He then specialized in the reinforcement of network security for 5G and 6G.
His research encompasses the fields of network security, including artificial intelligence applied to cybersecurity, in particular intrusion detection systems in critical networks (smart grids), the Internet of Things (IoT, industrial IoT), the study of the explicability and robustness of these systems, security in distributed/federated machine learning, and blockchain.
Research interests:
- Cybersecurity
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Artificial Intelligence
- Intrusion detection and mitigation systems, with a focus on their explainability, robustness, and resilience.
- Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
- Next-generation networks (5G and beyond/6G)
Miceline Mésidor: harnessing data for better healing
Professor Miceline Mésidor holds a doctorate in public health with a concentration on epidemiology from the Université de Montréal, and specializes in the study of applied statistical data in health. Professor Mésidor completed a postdoctoral fellowship in biostatistics applied to pharmacoepidemiology at Université Laval.
Professor Mésidor’s research activities focus on the use of statistical methods suited to the complexity of healthcare data, in particular to estimate how drugs will affect the progression of chronic illnesses. She is also interested in environmental and lifestyle factors in relation to certain cancers.
Her doctoral work on the effect of immunomodulators on the progression of multiple sclerosis and the use of care received special recognition from the Quebec Population Health Research Network.
Research interests:
- Pharmacotherapy and polypharmacy applied to chronic illnesses
- Personalized medicine and estimation of optimal treatment strategies
- Use of causal inference methods in case-control studies
- Trajectory analysis
Anne Ola: the future of coastal ecosystems
Professor Anne Ola, who holds a doctorate in environmental sciences from the University of Queensland in Australia, focuses on the role of plants in coastal ecosystems and on plant-soil interactions. More specifically, she is studying the importance of plants in coastal protection and carbon sequestration.
From 2019 to 2023, Professor Ola worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Université Laval, first for the Sentinel North strategy and then for DREAM, a Canadian-American network on the sustainability of forest ecosystems.
Research interests:
- Vegetated coastal ecosystems (salt marshes and mangroves)
- Erosion and coastal protection
- Carbon dynamics
- Plant ecophysiology
Ryan Pardy: interferons and Cryptosporidium parasites
Professor Ryan Pardy studied in the Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences at Queen’s University in Ontario before obtaining his doctorate at McGill University in Montreal, where he studied T-cell responses to Zika virus infection.
For his postdoctoral research, Ryan Pardy joined the laboratories of Professors Chris Hunter and Boris Striepen at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, where he focused his work on the reaction of intestinal epithelial cells to infection with Cryptosporidium parasites.
Research interests:
- Interferons and mucosal immunity
- Host-pathogen interactions
- Cryptosporidium parasites
- Cellular and molecular biology
- Virology
