Hélène Vézina holds a PhD in demography from the Université de Montréal. She was a professor in the Department of Human and Social Sciences at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi from 1996 to 2023. Since 2024, she has been professor emeritus.

Her research program addresses issues of historical demography and population genetics in a multidisciplinary context. She has participated, as principal investigator or co-investigator, in projects on kinship, ancestral origins, fertility and longevity in the Quebec population as well as on the genealogical characteristics of various diseases with a hereditary component. She also works on the genetic, ethnocultural and demographic diversity of Quebec’s regional populations and the demohistorical factors that have helped shape this diversity. Her research is based on the exploitation of genealogical and family data from the BALSAC database, which she has been using since her doctoral thesis on the demographic and genealogical aspects of Alzheimer’s disease.

From 2010 to 2023, she was head of the BALSAC Project in charge of developing, exploiting and promoting the population database. She notably led two major projects funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI). The first, carried out from 2013 to 2018, enabled the construction of the Integrated Infrastructure for Historical Microdata on the Quebec Population (IMPQ). From 2019 to 2024, she worked on the i-BALSAC project, an initiative that led to the creation of the GÉNÉO portal, a multisectoral research platform bringing together genealogical, genetic and geographic data that aims to support cutting-edge research on the population of Quebec.