Biography:

Dr. Honer trained in medicine at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and received his MD in 1984.  Following a year of internal medicine training at the Vancouver General Hospital, he was a resident in psychiatry at the New York State Psychiatric Institute/Columbia University for three years. During the final year of his residency program, and for the next three years, Dr. Honer was a research fellow at Columbia University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he was a member of Dr. Peter Davies’ neuropathology research group.

Dr. Honer moved to Vancouver in 1991, and is now the Jack Bell Chair in Schizophrenia, Professor and Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. He is Director of the UBC Institute of Mental Health, Vice-President, Academic and Strategic Development, BC Mental Health and Addictions Services, and is a consultant psychiatrist. Dr. Honer is also an Honorary Professor in the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Hong Kong, and a Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry in Columbia University in New York.

He received a Scientist Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and has received both the Young Investigator Award (1997) and the Heinz Lehmann Award (2008) from the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology. Dr. Honer is the author of 215 peer-reviewed publications and has authored the assessment section of the Canadian Clinical Practice Guidelines for Schizophrenia.

Dr. Honer’s research interests include mechanism of illness and developing new treatments for schizophrenia, neural plasticity in Alzheimer’s disease, and understanding pathways to co-occurring illnesses including psychosis, addiction and viral infection.