Dr. Jackie Gardner-Nix

MB.BS, PhD., MRCP (UK).

Board Chair

Dr Gardner-Nix trained in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction with Jon Kabat-Zinn in 2001. She evolved the trauma-informed trauma-sensitive Mindfulness-Based Chronic Pain Management (MBCPMTM) curriculum over the last 20 years, which has been facilitated widely throughout Ontario.

She has a PhD in biochemistry and also qualified in medicine at University of London, England, before emigrating to Canada as a Terry Fox Cancer research fellow, later going into family practice and palliative care. From 1997 she focused on non-cancer pain management, working in Toronto teaching hospital pain clinics, into which she brought the Mindfulness program in 2002. She spread this program across Ontario via telemedicine. Her innovation earned her an Associate Professorship in the Dept. Anaesthesia at University of Toronto, and she was a chronic pain consultant at St Michael’s Hospital and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre until 2015.

She co-authored the 2009 book “The Mindfulness Solution to Pain”. She founded and is past owner of NeuroNova Centre for Mindful Solutions which collaborates with University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies in providing professional trainings in the Applied Certificate of Mindfulness Based Chronic Pain Management, as well as in Trauma-Sensitive Trauma-Informed Mindfulness Facilitation.

She still teaches online Mindfulness programs for those living with chronic pain, and is a founding member of the newly-forming Mindfulness Council of Canada to promote access to mindfulness programs across Canada. Jackie has three daughters and four grandchildren and lives with her husband and yellow labrador in Port Hope, Ontario.