Louis Barriault was born in Armagh, Québec, Canada in 1970. He received his B. Sc. (chemistry) in 1993 at the University of Sherbrooke. He pursed in Ph. D. studies under the supervision of Prof. Pierre Deslongchamps at the same institution where he worked on transannular Diels-Alder reaction. After completing his doctorate in 1997, he joined the group of Professor Leo A. Paquette at the Ohio State University (OSU) as a FCAR postdoctoral fellow where he completed the total synthesis of (-)-polycarvernoside A. In May 1999, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa where he has been promoted to Full Professor (2010). In recent years Louis accepted appointments as Vice-Dean Research (2014), VP Research of university (2017), and Dean of the Faculty of Science (2018).

His research involves the development of novel gold-catalyzed transformations and photoredox reactions and their applications to the synthesis of complex bioactive natural products. Louis received the prestigious John Polanyi Award in Chemistry (2000) and the Premier’s Research Excellence Award (2002) from the Ontario government. Other prestigious accolades include the Ottawa Life Science Michael Smith Award (2002), Boehringer Ingelheim Young Investigator Award (2002), University of Ottawa Young researcher of the year (2005), University of Ottawa excellence in education award (2005), and Merck Research Laboratory academic development (2006 and 2007). Louis was appointed University Research Chair in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (2006-2016) and was awarded the Boehringer Ingelheim Research Excellence Award (2012 by the Canadian Society for Chemistry. In 2014, Louis was appointed Vice-Dean Research for the Faculty of Science.

On a personal side, he is married with Julie Lamothe since 1995 and they have three children: William (b. 1997), Daniel (b. 1999) and Heidi (b. 2001). Louis enjoyed all kind of sports. He is scuba diving instructor (PADI and FQAS, class A instructor), O2 provider instructor and Emergency First Response Instructor. He enjoys diving in St-Lawrence River and around the World (Australia, Mexico, Bahamas, Hawaii). One of his dreams is to do cage diving with 15-18 feet great white sharks in Australia!