Patricia Conrod is a clinical psychologist by training and a full professor of Psychiatry at the Université de Montréal. She is based at the CHU Sainte-Justine Mother and Child Hospital Research Centre in Montreal, where she holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Preventive Mental Health and Addiction, and a Research Chair in Social and Community Pediatrics funded by the Fondation Julien/Jean & Marcelle Coutu.

Her research focuses on cognitive, personality, and biological risk factors for the development and maintenance of drug abuse, as well as the factors that mediate the co-occurrence of addictive behaviors with other mental disorders. Her experimental research investigates the factors that increase susceptibility to behavioral reinforcement from drugs of abuse. More recently, her research findings have led to the development of new approaches to substance abuse treatment and prevention that target personality risk factors and the underlying motivational determinants of drug use in subtypes of substance misusers. She developed the Preventure Program, which has been identified as an evidence-based prevention program in the UNODC International Standards for Drug Prevention and the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2016 Report on Addiction. Her research is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Fondation de Recherche en Santé du Québec, the European Commission (Health and Humanities and Social Sciences), the National Institutes of Health, the Medical Research Council-UK, and the National Health and Medical Research Council – Australia.

She is a member of the CIHR Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction Advisory Board, the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and an Associate Editor of Neuropsychopharmacology. She has co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed articles, some of which were published in Science, Nature, JAMA Psychiatry, and the American Journal of Psychiatry. Her research has been featured in news articles in the Financial Times, New York Times, The Guardian, Time Magazine, Maclean’s Magazine, and The Huffington Post. Through the Preventure community of practice, she trains professionals from around the world in evidence-based drug and alcohol prevention strategies. Dr. Conrod is the Scientific Director of the FRQS Quebec Research Network on Suicide, Mood Disorders, and Associated Conditions (RQSHA) and the CIHR Canadian Cannabis and Psychosis Research Team, and she leads the Strategy for Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Université de Montréal (SENSUM; www.sensum.umontreal.ca). She is currently one of five panel members appointed by the Canadian Government to review the Cannabis Act, set to publish its recommendations in April 2024.