Balancing Public Health, Indigenous Sovereignty and Research Ethics – U of Guelph

Apr 3, 2025

In a unique collaboration, University of Guelph researchers Drs. Melissa Perreault and Lawrence Goodridge are combining their areas of expertise in Indigenous scholarship and wastewater monitoring to inform a new Indigenous-specific policy that balances public health monitoring with privacy rights on First Nations.

Perreault, a neuroscientist in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, and Goodridge, professor in the Department of Food Science and director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety, advocate for these changes in a new paper recently published in Genomic Psychiatry.

The goal is to develop a policy, or a set of guiding principles, specific to Canada, but that can be adapted globally. “This isn’t just a problem in Canada,” Perreault says. “It is a problem globally.”

Read More: https://news.uoguelph.ca/2025/04/balancing-public-health-indigenous-sovereignty-and-research-ethics/