Doris Payer, PhD
Senior Knowledge Broker
Expertise:
Doris’s areas of expertise include drug effects on the brain, childhood trauma and harm reduction.
Biography:
Doris Payer has a passion for communicating the science of addiction. Her goal is to mobilize evidence to improve how society treats people who use drugs. She has wanted to get good information to the frontlines and policy makers since starting harm reduction work during the nineties rave scene.
Doris was born in Austria. Education and career ambitions have led her to work or study in five different countries. She earned her PhD in addiction neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2009. She then worked as a clinical research scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. In 2015 she left academic research to pursue her passion for knowledge mobilization. This journey took her to the United Kingdom as a neuroscience advisor at the Beckley Foundation (Oxford, U.K.). Afterwards, she served as co-ordinator of the Mental Health Innovation Network, a knowledge exchange platform jointly led by the Centre for Global Mental Health (London, U.K.) and the World Health Organization.
Doris joined CCSA in March 2018.