Dr. Porter is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia - Okanagan. He received a B.Sc. from Acadia University and a doctorate in forensic psychology (1998) from the University of British Columbia. During his training, he worked at Mountain Institution (a medium security federal prison), the Forensic Psychiatric Institute of British Columbia, the British Columbia Board of Parole, and a Victim Services organization in Vancouver. In 1998, he took up a faculty position at Dalhousie University in the Department of Psychology, where he is currently on a leave of absence.

Dr. Porter now works in the area of psychology and law as an educator, researcher, and practitioner. He has published research and theoretical articles on various forensic issues including credibility assessment, memory for childhood abuse, deception detection, psychopathy, and forensic aspects of memory. As a registered forensic psychologist, Dr. Porter has conducted approximately 180 assessments on offenders or accused persons, and been consulted in numerous other cases, often concerning recovered memory evidence and the credibility of child abuse accusations. Dr. Porter has been qualified as an expert witness in several legal cases in Canada. In addition, he has trained and lectured widely to various professional groups, including parole officers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and several groups of Canadian judges as part of the training programs of the National Judicial Institute.

In July, 2000, Dr. Porter was presented with the President's New Investigator Award from the Canadian Psychological Association. Recent awards include an operating grant ($101,000; 2004-2007) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and a Discovery grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada ($95,000; 2004-2009). He is a co-author (with Lawrence Wrightsman) of the new book Forensic Psychology: A Canadian Perspective (Thomson Nelson), published in March, 2005.