Eric Boilard PhD

Dr. Eric Boilard, PhD, is a recipient of a CIHR award, Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Laval University School of Medicine, and a researcher at the CHU de Québec Research Center. He is also a researcher with the Canadian National Transplant Research Program (CNTRP), where he is a co-leader and consulting member of the international group Systemic Lupus Collaborating Clinics (SLICC). He obtained his PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from Laval University (2003) and pursued postdoctoral training at the Université de Nice-Sophia-Antipolis (2003-2006) and at Harvard University at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (2006-2010). It was during his studies at Harvard that Dr. Boilard highlighted the role of platelets in rheumatoid arthritis (Boilard et al., Science 2010).

His research aims to better understand the pathogenesis of rheumatic diseases and to improve the success of blood transplants and transfusions to develop new therapeutics and biomarkers. He investigates how platelets and the small extracellular vesicles they produce, called microparticles, contribute to the inflammatory responses in place in rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and the cases of immune responses involved in transplant rejection and adverse reactions related to transfusions. He conducts clinical research with patients and mouse models of disease.

He is an internationally renowned scientist and lecturer recognized by his peers. He won the Radio-Canada Award for the greatest medical discovery of the year (2011 and 2013), the Radio-Canada and Le Soleil Award of the Scientist of the Year (2011), and is the recipient of the André Dupont Award for Quebec’s most prolific young researcher (2017). His work is in part funded by the CIHR Foundation Program (Platelets and their microparticles: versatile players of inflammation) and NSERC.