A Change Will Do You Good: New Approaches to Understand the Relationships Between Cannabis and Mental Illness

TK Li Lecture Dr. George is Professor of Psychiatry and in the Institute of Medical Sciences in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto (UofT), and Senior Scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, Canada. He received his B.Sc. (1988) and M.D. (1992) degrees from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and then did his psychiatry residency and fellowship in translational neurosciences at Yale University. He joined the Yale Psychiatry faculty in 1998, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004. In 2006, he moved to UofT and CAMH as the Chair in Addiction Psychiatry, which he held until 2012. He has held a number of leadership positions, including as Chief of Schizophrenia (2008-16) and Addictions (2016-19) at CAMH, and Co-Director of the Brain and Therapeutics Division in the UofT Department of Psychiatry (2006-2018). Dr. George's research is focused on understanding and treating substance use disorders in people with serious mental illness. He has published over 350 peer-reviewed articles, reviews and other reports. His work has been funded by NIH/NIDA and CIHR since 1999. From 2021-2023, he served as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee at the Canadian Centre for Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA). He has written the chapter on Nicotine and Tobacco in Cecil Textbook of Medicine in the last four editions (2011, 2015, 2019 and 2023), and served as Deputy Editor for ACNP's Journal Neuropsychopharmacology (NPP) for 10 years, before his appointment as Co-Principal Editor of NPP in 2023.