Dr. Ménard obtained her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Ottawa in 2013, after completing her internship at the London Health Sciences Centre. As a clinician, she has worked at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, the Ottawa Hospital, the University of Western Ontario and Detroit Receiving Hospital, among others. Her PhD dissertation was recently published as a book, Magnificent sex: Lessons from extraordinary lovers.
Dr. Ménard’s research interests vary widely. She recently completed a set of interview nurses living in Windsor and working in Windsor or Detroit about their experiences in hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also studies mental health and wellbeing in science students in collaboration with researchers in the Faculty of Science. Her review article on the subject of academic lab safety, published in Nature Chemistry, received over 25,000 downloads in the first two months that it appeared. She is currently researching the impact on mental health of involvement in lab accidents as well as students’ experiences of reporting accidents. She is in the process of investigating how students, staff and faculty experience the Impostor Phenomenon in academic settings and whether this can be improved by attending a workshop. She continues to collaborate with other researchers in the areas of optimal sexual experiences, representations of sex and sexuality in the media and the impact of childhood sexual abuse on adult interpersonal functioning.
When she is not professing, Dr. Ménard enjoys running, yoga, knitting, reading, playing guitar and trying to rehabilitate her rescue border collie. In addition to her PhD, she received accreditation as a sommelier from Algonquin College in 2012.