Dr. Ferland is the PI of the lab. She completed her PhD in the laboratory of Dr. Catharine Winstanley at the University of British Columbia, where she studied cognitive risk factors for addiction. During her doctoral training, she implemented and designed complex preclinical behavioral tasks to assess decision-making and impulsivity, integrating these approaches with psychopharmacology, in vivo microdialysis, and chemogenetics to define dopaminergic contributions to cognition. Building on this foundation, her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Yasmin Hurd at Mount Sinai incorporated advanced molecular approaches, including next-generation sequencing, fluorescent in situ hybridization, confocal microscopy, and computational analyses. This work enabled the identification of cell-type-specific effects of adolescent and adult THC exposure and established translational links to cognitive outcomes observed in human cannabis users.

Outside of the lab she loves to cook, be outdoors, and spend time with her husband, daughter and anxious beagle.