Jennifer Coelho obtained her PhD in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 2006 and completed a CIHR Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Maastricht University (the Netherlands) and a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship at the University of Savoie (France) before arriving at the Douglas Institute in 2011.

Jennifer’s earlier work focused on the psychological and behavioural consequences of exposure to food-related cues. She has investigated how different types of food cues in the environment (such as the sight and smell of food) influence mood and food intake in chronic dieters and non-dieters.

More recently, she has been concentrating on how thought processes related to food, weight, and shape may play a role in the development and maintenance of eating disorders.

Another area of interest is the overlap between the thought processes related to eating disorders and those that play a role in anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Jennifer’s research approach involves both a strategic fundamental line (in which psychological theories are experimentally tested) and a more applied research line in which interventions that are derived from the theoretical models are tested.