Dr. Cecilia Flores is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and an Associate Member of the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University. She is a Principal Investigator at the McGill Douglas–Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (an International Collaborative Initiative in Adversity and Mental Health) and at the Ludmer Centre at McGill University. She is a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and the past President of the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology.  She received her Ph.D at the Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology at Concordia University. She did post-doctoral studies at Harvard Medical School and the Montreal Neurological Institute. The overall theme of her research is the neurobiology of brain development in adolescence and how it is impacted by stressors and drugs of abuse. Using multidisciplinary and translational approaches, her team has demonstrated that a set of guidance cue genes and their epigenetic regulators orchestrate the development of the prefrontal cortex in adolescence and are tightly linked to substance use disorder and major depression in humans. Dr. Flores runs an active research laboratory at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. She holds grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), from the National Institutes of Health, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Les Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Santé (FRQS), and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI). She received the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology Young Investigator Award in 2010 and the Innovations in Neuropsychopharmacology Research Award in 2019.