Dr. Dara Charney Biography

Dr. Dara Alexandra Charney

Dr. Charney is currently an Associate Professor and the Associate Chair (Education) of the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University. She is the Director of the McGill RUIS Addiction Program, and an Attending Psychiatrist at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) Addictions Unit.

Dr. Charney graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in 1987. She obtained her MD from McGill University in 1991, and remained at McGill during her Psychiatry Residency and Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship. She joined the Department of Psychiatry in 1997 as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005. She has held the positions of Program Director for McGill Psychiatry Postgraduate Education from 2002-10, Associate Chair of the Department of Psychiatry since 2010, and Director of the McGill RUIS Addiction Program since 2008. On a national level, she has served as an examiner for the Royal College Examination Board in Psychiatry, and as the Chair of COPE (Coordinators of Postgraduate Education).

Dr. Charney has received numerous awards and recognition, including The Millenium Research Award (2002-2003), an FRSQ Chercheur-Boursier Clinicien Award (2003-2005), The Senator W. David Angus Award for Research in Major Psychiatric Illness (2006-2009), as well as a team award from the Kaiser Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health and Substance Use Programming (2011).

Dr. Charney's clinical and research work is conducted at the MUHC Addictions Unit. The focus of her research is in the area of substance use disorders (SUD), with particular attention to persons with a “dual diagnosis” (concurrent substance use and psychiatric disorders). She has initiated a number of clinical research projects involving patients treated at the MUHC Addictions Unit, and has followed a large number of patients prospectively to determine predictors of treatment outcome. Dr. Charney has received funding from the Fonds de la Recherche en Santé du Québec (FRSQ), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), as well as the Research Institute of the MUHC

Dr. Charney has presented and taught on a wide variety of subjects in Psychiatry. She teaches several postgraduate courses in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill. She co-organizes an annual Addiction Training Program for front-line healthcare workers in the Montreal area, and supervises the clinical training of over 20 psychiatry residents and medical students each year at the MUHC.