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Krausz, Michael - Biography

Reinhard Michael Krausz, MD, PhD, FRCPC
Professor of Psychiatry, Epidemiology and Public Health
University of British Columbia (UBC)
St. Paul`s Hospital, Providence Health Care
Centre of Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences (CHEOS)

Medical Director of the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addiction
Medical Director of the Regional Program for Complex Concurrent Disorders

Founding Fellow of the Institute of Mental Health at UBC
Member of the Brain Research Centre at UBC

Member of the Research Advisory Council of the
Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research
of the Canadian Centre of Substance Abuse (CCSA)
of the Vancouver Foundation

Fellow of the World Innovation Foundation (WIF)

Dr. Krausz started his professional carrier as a nurse in adolescent psychiatry working especially with young psychotic clients. After Medical School in Hamburg the H.Böckler Foundation awarded him a doctoral grant. He wrote his thesis on long-term course of schizophrenia starting in adolescence. In 1985 he started his residency in Adult Psychiatry until 1991. Parallel he wrote his PhD on “Psychosis and Addiction” evaluating the entanglement of severe mental illness and harmful use of psychotropic substances, which then became the major research focus of his further work. He became then responsible for big studies about mental illness among intravenous drug users with over 1000 individuals and especially the German Heroin trial as biggest randomized clinical trial in Addiction Research in Europe in this field. He could show, that it is possible to improve the most difficult to treat clients with the appropriate intervention and contributed to an important paradigm shift through clinical research. He founded and edited two scientific journals, which until now have a mayor impact in this area: European Addiction Research and Suchttherapie.  250 publications and even more invited presentations standing for his scientific contributions until now. After over 20 years in different positions in Germany he was selected as the first Providence BC Leadership Chair for Addiction Research in 2005.
He served on several Advisory Boards on international, national, provincial and City level in Germany and Canada, including the Senior Research Advisory Board from CCSA, the Research Advisory Council of the Michael Smith Foundation and the as Co Chair of the Collaboration for Change in Vancouver.
Since April 2009 he is Medical Director of the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addiction and the regional program for Complex Concurrent Disorders.