Dr. William Honer, MD

Disclosure

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 the Jack Bell Chair in Schizophrenia, Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, and a Consultant Psychiatrist. He was Head of the Department from 2011-2018. 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.

Dr. Honer was elected to Fellowship in the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2012. 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. In 2018, Dr. Honer received the JM Cleghorn Award for Excellence and Leadership in Clinical Research from the Canadian Psychiatric Association. Dr. Honer is the author of over 400 peer-reviewed publications. He co-authored the assessment and pharmacotherapy sections of the Canadian Clinical Practice Guidelines for Schizophrenia, and the Treatment Response and Resistance in Psychosis working group guideline on diagnosis and terminology.

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. His clinical research investigates risk factors for neuropsychiatric illness, with symptomatology, cognitive, and neuroimaging outcomes. A final area is clinical trials, including a well-cited report as first author in the New England Journal of Medicine 2006; 354:472-482.