University of B.C. researchers are working with Indigenous scholars and communities to bring Indigenous perspectives into brain science.
Dr. Judy Illes, professor of neurology in UBC’s Faculty of Medicine and director of Neuroethics Canada, and her research collaborator Dr. Melissa Perreault, a member of the Métis Nation and an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Guelph, are working with research partners and Indigenous scholars and communities to bring Indigenous knowledge and understandings into brain science.
They recently co-authored a seminal paper on integrating Indigenous perspectives with Western approaches in neuroscience. The paper was informed, in part, by the work of Dr. Illes’s former graduate student, Louise Harding, on engaging with Indigenous communities in brain science.
We caught up with Dr. Perreault, Dr. Illes and Louise Harding now at the University of Sydney School of Medicine, to learn about how — and why — brain researchers are integrating Indigenous ways of knowing into their work.
