Dr. John Lavis

John N. Lavis, MD PhD, is the Director of the McMaster Health Forum, Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Transfer and Exchange, a Professor (in both the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Department of Political Science), and a Member of the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis at McMaster University. His principal research interests include knowledge transfer and exchange in public policymaking environments and the politics of health systems. He directs the Program in Policy Decision-Making, a research program affiliated with McMaster’s Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis, and he wrote the report that underpins the chapter on “linking research to action” in the World Report on Knowledge for Better Health. He teaches an undergraduate course on the politics of health systems for the Bachelor of Health Sciences (Honours) programme at McMaster, a simulations course in the same programme, and the doctoral seminar for the PhD in Health Policy programme. He teaches a week-long module on ‘Promoting the use of research-based evidence in healthcare organizations’ for Canada’s Executive Training for Research Application (EXTRA) program and runs one-day and two-day workshops on using research evidence for governments and international agencies. He led the development of Health Systems Evidence, a continuously updated repository of syntheses of research evidence about health systems. He is President of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Advisory Committee on Health Research and a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Advisory Committee on Health Research. He is Co-Editor of the Policy Briefs series co-published by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and the WHO-sponsored Health Evidence Network. He is a member of the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research (AHSPR) Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee, the Cochrane Collaboration’s Effective Practice and Organization of Care (EPOC) Review Group, and the WHO-sponsored Evidence-Informed Policy Network (EVIPNet) Resource Group. John holds an MD from Queen's University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from Harvard University.