Charlotte Usselman

Charlotte Usselman, PhD is an Associate Professor and Associate Investigator at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC), where she leads research within the Cardiovascular Health Across the Lifespan Program. Her work bridges cardiovascular physiology and gender-specific medicine, with a particular focus on understanding how sex differences and gonadal hormones influence cardiovascular regulation and health outcomes across diverse populations.

Dr. Usselman's research program centers on the neurovascular control of blood pressure and cardiovascular health, employing integrative physiology approaches to study mechanisms across various age groups and clinical conditions. Her laboratory investigates how perturbations to the gonadal hormone milieu—including conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome and postmenopause—affect cardiovascular regulation. Her work has established important connections between sex hormones, sympathetic nervous system activity, and vascular function, highlighting critical sex-specific differences in cardiovascular physiology that have implications for clinical practice and research design.

Analysis of her recent publications reveals a strong emphasis on sex as a biological variable in cardiovascular research, with particular attention to women's health conditions. Her work spans multiple methodologies including direct neural recordings, vascular function assessments, and hormonal manipulations, consistently demonstrating how sex differences manifest in cardiovascular responses to stressors, exercise, and disease states. This body of work has contributed significantly to understanding why cardiovascular disease presents differently in women and men.

Dr. Usselman has been instrumental in developing guidelines for incorporating sex and gender considerations into cardiovascular research, as evidenced by her 2024 invited review in the American Journal of Physiology - Heart and Circulatory Physiology. Her systematic reviews and meta-analyses on topics like physical fitness in women with polycystic ovary syndrome have helped synthesize complex findings across multiple studies.

Her laboratory actively investigates the cardiovascular implications of polycystic ovary syndrome, examining how androgen excess and body composition affect endothelial function and blood pressure regulation. This work has important clinical implications for understanding the elevated cardiovascular risk in women with this condition. Additionally, her research on salivary versus blood hormone assessments has provided valuable methodological insights for researchers studying female participants.