Dr.

Russell J. Schachar

Faculty

MD, FRCP(C)

Full Professor

Child & Adolescent

Staff Psychiatrist, The Hospital for Sick Children
Senior Scientist, Research Institute, The Hospital for Sick Children
Toronto Dominion Bank Financial Group Chair in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Hospital For Sick Children

555 University Avenue

Ste. 4278

Toronto, ON

M5G 1X8

416-813-6564

russell.schachar@sickkids.ca

416-813-6565

Russell Schachar is a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist, Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, and Senior Scientist in the Research Institute at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada where he heads a cognitive neurosciences laboratory which focuses on psychiatric disorders of childhood and adolescence. After medical school at the University of Toronto, he trained in Psychiatry at McMaster University where he was extensively mentored both clinically and scientifically by Jock Cleghorn. He developed his passion for research while participating in the monthly meetings of the Friends of Schizophrenia Study Group (FOSS- “in hoc sign glitchit”) which Dr Cleghorn led. This experience introduced him to critical importance of cognitive function to child development and psychopathology. As a result of Dr Cleghorn’s mentorship, Schachar undertook a 4-years fellowship under the supervision of Professor Sir Michael Rutter at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, England with support from the Medical Research Council of Canada.

Dr Russell Schachar is a senior scientist in the Research Institute at The Hospital for Sick Children, a member of the Institute for Medical Sciences and faculty in the Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Dr Schachar’s career has been dedicated to identifying the causes of and treatments for common, persisting and impairing childhood disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and for the effects of acquired brain injury in children. Schachar founded a programme at the Hospital for Sick Children for children with attention, learning and behaviour problems which blended state of the art clinical assessment with wrap-around treatment in a research context. This clinic has been in continuous operation since 1985 and has provided the basis for his research and that of numerous colleagues and students most of whom have gone on to outstanding careers as independent scientists. Schachar, colleagues and students apply a unique combination of clinical, cognitive, functional imaging, genetic and treatment methods in what is best described as a cognitive neurosciences approach. His early studies posited the distinction between situational and pervasive ADHD, a distinction that has had an enduring impact on nosological, clinical and research practice in the field. By combining state-of-the-art cognitive theory and methods, Schachar and his colleagues discovered that deficits in key processes such as response inhibition, the ability to stop one’s action when goals or circumstances change and error processing, the ability to detect and correct one’s mistakes lie at the heart of ADHD and OCD and are also common after injury to the brain. These studies had a significant impact on the cognitive neurosciences approach in child psychiatry. Since his earliest publication on inhibition in ADHD, for example, there have been hundreds of studies of inhibition in ADHD and other child and adult psychiatric disorders and numerous meta-analyses. The cognitive approach developed by Schachar and colleagues has been widely used to study the subtle effects of commonly used medications in ADHD and OCD, cognition in animal models, and normal and abnormal development. Currently, he is combining genetic and neuro-imaging methods to discover the neural basis of response inhibition and error processing and to delineate the genetic and environmental factors that influence these processes and thereby the risk for developing disorders such as ADHD. In the largest project of its kind, he and colleagues collected cognitive, behavioural and genetic data from 17,000 child and adolescent visitors to the Ontario Science Centre and are conducting genetic analysis of cognitive and behavioural traits. A recently funded study will apply the same methods to analysis of the consequences of radiation to the brain in young individuals.
Dr Schachar co-leads the POND study, a recently funded project that aims to develop a platform to enhance discovery of etiology and therapeutics across the major neurodevelopmental disorders (autism, OCD, ADHD and developmental disability). With funding from the Ontario Brain Institute, the Federal government and private industry, he is developing a centre of excellence for the development of rehabilitation software and methods for ADHD and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
Dr Schachar has trained numerous graduate students, has fostered the careers of many colleagues and has established a mentorship programme for junior faculty in his Division. He works with child psychiatry programmes in Israel and Korea to help develop their scientific programmes. He has lectured widely (e.g., South Korea, South Africa, Great Britain, Israel, USA, The Netherlands, Australia). Until recently, he was director of Research in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and led the Fellowship Programme for the Division. Currently, he is intensively involved in the process of renewal within the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, Centre for Addictions and Mental Health and The Hospital for Sick Children.
He currently holds numerous external grants and has published more than 60 journal articles in the last 5 years and 170 during his career. Dr Schachar holds the Toronto Dominion Bank Financial Group Chair in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and was recipient of the Elaine Schlosser Lewis Award from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He is past editor of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Supplement of the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry and has been a member of various scientific review organizations (Canadian Institutes for Health Research, National Institutes of Mental health, USA and Ontario Mental health Foundation).

Department of Psychiatry, The Hospital for Sick Children
Research Institute, The Hospital for Sick Children
Institute of Medical Sciences, University of Toronto