Bio:
Dr. Myrna Lashley, CM, holds a Ph.D in counseling psychology from McGill university. She was an Associate Academic dean at John Abbott College She is also an associate professor in the department of psychiatry of McGill University as well as a researcher at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at the Jewish General Hospital and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Geopsychiatry, Bern, Switzerland. She is an internationally recognized clinical, teaching and, research authority in cultural psychology, and serves as an expert psychological consultant to institutions, including the juvenile justice system. For seven years, she was the Chair of the First-Line Psychosocial Science Committee of the Clinical Ethics Committee of CIUSS de centre-ouest-de-l'ile-de-Montréal. She has worked both as a consultant to First Nations and the Jewish communities, and as the Cross Cultural Trainer for the Grievance Committee office of the secretariat for McGill University. She has also conducted training workshops locally, nationally, and internationally and has acted as a consultant to the Brazilian health care system. She was a director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and has also served on the Comité consultatif sur les relations Interculturelles et Interraciales de la Communauté Urbaine de Montréal. From 2008 to 2017 she was the Chair of the Cross Cultural Roundtable on Security. She was Vice-chair of the board of the École Nationale de Police du Québec from 2004 - 2017. As well as conducting research on police matters, she has also been appointed to the Comité expert en matière de profilage racial of the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal and to the Comité-conseil sur l'organisation d'une consultation sur le racisme et la discrimination systémique. She is a consultant to government and non-governmental agencies at the Canadian federal, provincial and municipal levels on issues of equity and inclusivity. In addition to academic publications, she has also authored two training manuals on intercultural issues in the workplace and co-authored book chapters. She has received several awards including Barbados High Commission Inaugural Award 2026; Great Concordian 2024; Order of Canada, 2024; Horary Doctorate from University of Ottawa, 2024, 2021 CBC Changemaker, 2015 Woman of Merit Award from the Playmas Montreal Cultural Association; the Queen Elizabeth II 2012 Diamond Jubilee award; 2006 Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Award for Holocaust studies; the 2004 Martin Luther King legacy award; as well as the 1995 Merit Award for the Kanawake Native survival school.
Her current research focuses on the intersections of culture, terrorism and national security. Dr. Lashley is co-chair of the Caribbean Centre for Geopsychiatry.
She is currently Barbados’s Honorary Consul to Montreal.