The BALSAC file is under the responsibility of 3 partner universities: UQAC, Université Laval and Université de Montréal. Under an agreement between the tree institutions, UQAC is mandated for the day-to-day management of the population file, including all matters related to the protection of personal information and access to data.
Direction
Simon Girard
The BALSAC Project is currently managed by Simon Girard, professor of genetics in the Department of Basic Sciences at UQAC.
Simon Girard has a master's degree in neurological sciences and a doctorate in molecular biology at the University of Montreal. His research juggles several areas of interest, including the study of genetic factors that can lead to epilepsy, schizophrenia or asthma; the genetics of Quebec populations; as well as genomics in general.
Previous directions
Hélène Vézina (2010-2023)
Hélène Vézina holds a doctorate in demography from the Université de Montréal and is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. Her research program addresses historical demography and population genetics issues in a multidisciplinary context. She has participated in projects on kinship, ancestral origins, fertility and longevity in the Quebec population as well as on various genetic and multifactorial diseases. She has also studied the genetic, ethnocultural and demographic diversity of Quebec's regional populations and the demohistorical factors that have helped shape this diversity. Her research is based on the exploitation of genealogical and family data from the BALSAC file, which she has been using since her doctoral thesis on the demographic and genealogical aspects of Alzheimer's disease. Since 2010, she has been leading the development and exploitation of the BALSAC population file. From 2013 to 2018, she led a project funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to develop an integrated infrastructure of historical microdata on the Quebec population (IMPQ). She is currently working on a new CFI-funded initiative to create i-BALSAC, a multi-sectoral platform for leading-edge research in the biomedical and social sciences.
Gérard Bouchard (1972-2010)
Gerard Bouchard is a professor in the human sciences department at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi. He has a master's degree in sociology from Laval University (1968) and a doctorate in history from the University of Paris (1971). He founded the BALSAC project and directed it from 1972 to 2010. The objective of this project is to develop and operate a computerized nominative database covering the entire population of Quebec from the beginnings of settlement (17e th century) until contemporary times. Using automatic reconstitution of families and genealogies, this database enables research projects in a wide range of fields, from history to sociology, and from population genetics to epidemiology. genetic. Database expansion still continues.