Éric Fombonne (Paris, 1954), MD, FRCP, is a French psychiatrist and epidemiologist based in Montreal. Training He trained in Paris and was subsequently appointed as a career research scientist in Paris, at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM). In the early 1990s, he joined Pr. Rutter's MRC Child Psychiatry Unit at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London where he held a Senior Lecturer post and an Honorary Consultant position at the Maudsley Hospital. In 1997, he was promoted as Reader In Epidemiological Psychiatry at the Institute of psychiatry. In 2001, he was appointed at McGill University in Canada as tenured full professor in Psychiatry. From 2001 to 2009, he directed the child psychiatry division at McGill University and the psychiatry department at the Montreal Children's Hospital, where he played a key role in the launch of its autism clinical and research program. Fombonne is also the recipient of the Canada Research Chair in child psychiatry since 2001. He is a practicing child psychiatrist and has clinics at the Montreal Children's Hospital for subjects with autism and other developmental disorders. Fombonne was president of the Association of Professors of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of Canada (APCAPC). He was Associate Editor of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders from 1994 to 2003, and is a member of several editorial boards, and a consultant for several scientific organizations such as NIH/NIMH or foundations. Over the years, he has been a supportive member of several family associations, including Autism France and Autism Europe. Research His research focuses on epidemiological investigations of childhood mental illness and related risk factors, with a particular focus on the epidemiology of autism. He conducted the first population based survey of child psychiatric disorders among school aged children in France. In the UK, he conducted research on childhood depression and its long term outcomes. In France and in the UK, and later in Canada, he performed several surveys of autism in childhood populations. He and his colleagues were credited with demonstrating that there is no epidemiological evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine or mercury-containing vaccines and autism, as postulated by other researchers including Andrew Wakefield. Fombonne was subsequently involved as a key scientific expert witness in several trials in US courts and class actions. He was influential in explicating the lack of evidence linking thimerosal in vaccines, or specific