John Lavis

John Norman Lavis (born June 11, 1965) is a Canadian physician based in Toronto, Ontario. He is a tenured professor in the Department of Health Evidence and Impact at McMaster University, where he founded and directs the McMaster Health Forum. He is co-lead of Rapid-Improvement Support and Exchange (RISE).

Lavis serves as the director of the World Health Organization's Collaborating Centre for Evidence-Informed Policy and chairs the Advisory Committee on Health Research to the Pan American Health Organization. He additionally holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Evidence-Informed Health Systems.

He has co-led various research and policy development activities during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, including participation on the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table and the COVID-19 Evidence Network to Support Decision-Making (COVID-END).

Early life and education Lavis was born June 11, 1965, in Montréal, Quebec. He earned his MD at Queen's University at Kingston from 1983 to 1989, at which time he joined the Canadian Medical Association and the Ontario Medical Association. During the summer of 1995 he worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Work and Health, returning again in June 1996 until his Harvard graduation in 1997. He assisted the Milbank Memorial Fund in setting up their population health website in 2000 and 2001.

From 2001 to 2006, Lavis was a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Transfer and Uptake, and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Transfer and Exchange from 2006 to 2011. Lavis co-developed the Evidence-Informed Policy Network (EVIPNet) alongside the World Health Organization in the mid-2000s, and he remains co-chair of the global steering group. He founded the McMaster Health Forum in April 2009. He was made co-director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Evidence-Informed Policy in December 2010. From 2012 to 2017, Lavis was an adjunct professor of global health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

He is co-lead investigator for the COVID-19 Evidence Network to Support Decision-Making (COVID-END), through which he has gathered evidence syntheses related to protocols for treatment and management of COVID-19 since April 2020. In this role, he also co-led the Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges, which published the Evidence Commission report in January 2022.

Lavis participated as a speaker at the March 2022 Centre of Excellence for Development Impact and Learning (CEDIL) conference.

Research In 2002, Lavis contributed a discussion paper titled Political Elites and Their Influence on Health-Care Reform In Canada to the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada (otherwise known as the Romanow Commission).

As the Canada Research Chair in Evidence-Informed Health Systems, Lavis is evaluating how governments prepare themselves and make decisions relating to public health policy.

Other activities

AcademyHealth, member AIDS Committee of Toronto, former chair Africa Centre for Evidence, adjunct professor Commonwealth Fund, Harkness Fellows program Canadian associate (2001–2002) Health Systems Global, member (2012–present)