Welcome! My name is Harry MacKay and I’m a behavioural science fellow currently working at Impact Canada within the Privy Council Office. Here, I work to optimize policy design and implementation using the principles of behavioural science.
My background is in the study of how the brain’s feeding and metabolic circuitry develops from an epigenetic and neuroanatomical perspective. I am particularly interested in the application of next-gen sequencing methods (bisulfite-seq, RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, etc.,) and bioinformatics to questions in developmental neuroepigenetics. During graduate school I taught several courses in the Neuroscience department, and I also do a bit of graphic design, woodworking, and electronics, so I’ve included examples of these projects as well.
Education:
- St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish NS
- Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours (Psychology), 2009
- Carleton University, Ottawa, ON
- M.Sc. Psychology (specialization in neuroscience), Fast-tracked into Ph.D. program
- Carleton University, Ottawa, ON
- Ph.D. Neuroscience, 2015
Research interests:
- Neuroendocrinology of body weight homeostasis
- Epigenetics
- Neurodevelopment
- Stress
- Circadian rhythms
- Neuroanatomy
- Endocrine disrupting compounds
- Adipose tissue function
Techniques:
- qRT-PCR
- Immunohistochemistry, immunofluorescence
- Conventional histology
- Confocal microscopy
- Stereology
- Western blot
- Flow cytometry, FACS
- Indirect calorimetry
- Next-gen sequencing
Software:
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
- MS Office
- SPSS
- Graphpad Prism
- LaTeX
- Arduino
- Sketchup
- R
Other skills and interests:
- Graphic design
- Furniture design
- Carpentry
- Arduino/electronics design
- Playing music (guitar)