Utting Lecture 2022

Dr. Frey is Professor at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University, Academic Head of the Mood Disorders Program, and Medical Director of the Women’s Health Concerns Clinic at  St. Joseph's Healthcare. He completed his M.D. and specialization in Psychiatry at the FFFCMPA and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

Dr. Frey completed a Research Fellowship at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, working with brain imaging in bipolar disorder. Subsequently, Dr. Frey completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in brain imaging at the Montreal Neurological Institute (McGill University), where he conducted a PET imaging study correlating serotonin synthesis and 5HT1A receptor binding in the human brain. Dr. Frey is also a former recipient of a CIHR fellowship award in women’s mental health.

Currently, Dr. Frey has more than 250 articles published in peer-reviewed journals and his h-index is 43 according to the Web of ScienceTM, and 55 according to Google Scholar. ( Source)

Michael Lifshitz is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University and the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal.

He completed his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at McGill and then a postdoctoral fellowship in Anthropology at Stanford. He is interested in practices that aim to transform subjective experience—from meditation and hypnosis to placebos, prayer, and psychedelics.

His work combines brain imaging and qualitative methods to shed light on the plasticity of consciousness in both health and disease.

In addition to Dr. Frey, we will have the honour to hear from Julia Bene, who is a patient peer support worker at the emergency psychiatry and in-patient services of the Jewish General Hospital and as part of the Mental Health and Addiction Program.