Simone Natalie Vigod is a Canadian scientist, Professor and Labatt Family Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She focuses her research on perinatal mood disorders and has conducted some of the largest studies worldwide on maternal mental illness around the time of pregnancy.
Vigod graduated from McGill University in 1999 with her Honours Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology. She then earned her medical degree from the University of Toronto, where she completed her psychiatric residency in 2009, and an MSc in Clinical Epidemiology in 2011.
Following her residency in psychiatry, Vigod joined Women's College Hospital to continue her research on reproductive health.
In 2014, Vigod became the program lead for Women's College Hospital's Reproductive Life Stages (RLS) program. The aim of the program was to provide care to women with mental health issues across their reproductive life cycle. Under her leadership, the team created and evaluated Mother Matters, an online therapist-facilitated support group for women across Ontario with postpartum mental health issues.
At the same time, she was also appointed the Shirley A. Brown Memorial Chair in WomenâÂÂs Mental Health Research for a term of five years. In this role, Vigod collaborated with an international team of womenâÂÂs mental health researchers to develop a primer on PPDs. In November 2018, Vigod was appointed the chief of psychiatry at WomenâÂÂs College Hospital.
While serving in these leadership roles, Vigod developed an online patient decision aid to help women make choices about antidepressant use in pregnancy. In 2020, Vigod studied mental health support for mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at demographic data and mental health visits for more than 137,000 people in Ontario. Following this, she was named the winner of The Royal-Mach-Gaensslen Prize for Mental Health Research as an outstanding mental health researcher enabling future exploration and discovery.
She appears regularly in the media on maternal and pregnancy issues.
In 2025, Vigod was appointed Labatt Family Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, succeeding Dr. Benoit Mulsant, who had held the chair from 2015 to 2025. She continued her clinical and research work at Women's College Hospital while taking on the role, with her research focused on reducing disparities in mental health care, particularly for women across the lifespan and for diverse populations.