Renate Ysseldyk, PhD, is Associate Professor of Health Sciences and Director of the Social Identity and Health Lab at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Before joining Carleton, she completed postdoctoral work at the University of Exeter (UK) and the University of Queensland (Australia), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Her current work has been funded by grants from SSHRC, the International Research Network for the Study of Science & Belief in Society (INSBS), and the Centre for Aging & Brain Health Innovation (CABHI).

As a social and health psychologist, her research focuses on the social determinants of health among potentially vulnerable populations (e.g., older adults living with dementia, caregivers, individuals who have experienced discrimination, trauma, or illness). She takes an interdisciplinary, mixed-method, and community-based approach to contribute toward understanding and promoting individual mental health, and healthy societies more broadly, by focusing on three interconnected themes: 1) healthy ageing, 2) (non)religious, ethnic, and gender identities, and 3) coping with stress. Her research program is thus grounded in a social identity framework for studying the influence of psychosocial factors on coping with stressful experiences and life transitions amid a primarily medicalized landscape of care.