Dr. Catherine Labbé received her PhD in biomedical sciences from the Université de Montréal in January 2012. Her thesis was focused on the genetics of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) and she used high-throughput (very sensitive) genotyping platforms to identify risk factors to IBD. She worked under the supervision of Dr John Rioux, a member of the team that first identified a risk factor for Crohn's disease in the LRRK2 gene. In 2012, Dr Labbé moved to Jacksonville to join Dr. Ross's laboratory in the neuroscience department at the Mayo Clinic and started working on population-based genetic studies on Parkinson's disease (PD) and related disorders. She has co-authored 15 publications on the genetics of complex diseases, seven in the last two years, including four specifically on PD, and is the recipient of a fellowship from the Fonds the recherche en Santé du Québec (FRSQ).