John Lavis

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John Norman Lavis is a Canadian physician and health‑policy expert based in Toronto. He is a tenured professor at McMaster University, where he founded and leads the McMaster Health Forum. He co-leads the Rapid-Improvement Support and Exchange (RISE) project and directs the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Evidence-Informed Policy. He chairs the Advisory Committee on Health Research for the Pan American Health Organization and holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Evidence-Informed Health Systems. He contributed to Ontario’s COVID-19 decision-making through the provincial Science Advisory Table and the COVID-END network.

Lavis was born in Montreal in 1965. He earned his medical degree from Queen’s University (1989) and completed an internship at North York General Hospital (1989–1990). He completed a Master of Science in Health Planning and Financing at the London School of Economics (1991–1992) and was a visiting researcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. In 1992 he consulted for the World Health Organization on HIV prevention costs in developing countries and later earned a PhD in Health Policy from Harvard University (1994–1997).

He began his faculty career at McMaster in 1997. He has advised the World Bank and the Conference Board of Canada, and served as an assistant professor at the University of Toronto (1999–2001). He led the Health Evidence Applications and Linkage Network (HEALNet) from 1999 to 2002 and helped create a Milbank Memorial Fund population health website (2000–2001). He also held Canada Research Chair appointments focused on knowledge transfer.

In the mid-2000s, Lavis helped develop EVIPNet with the World Health Organization, a network to turn evidence into policy, and he remains a co-chair of its global steering group. He founded the McMaster Health Forum in 2009 and became co-director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Evidence-Informed Policy in 2010. He was an adjunct professor at Harvard (2012–2017) and was named a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in 2015. He became a visiting adjunct professor in Johannesburg in 2018 and, in 2019, began co-leading RISE.

Lavis’ work centers on how governments use evidence to shape public health policy and strengthen health systems worldwide, including during the COVID-19 era. He has contributed to international efforts on evidence for policy and continues to publish on evidence-informed health policy.