Peter Tugwell (born March 30, 1944) is a

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

physician A physician (American English), medical practitioner (Commonwealth English), medical doctor, or simply doctor, is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through th ...

and

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...

in the Department of Medicine and School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the

University of Ottawa The University of Ottawa (french: Université d'Ottawa), often referred to as uOttawa or U of O, is a bilingual public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on directly to the northeast of Downtown Ottaw ...

. He is known for promoting clinical epidemiology and championing for

health equity Health equity arises from access to the social determinants of health, specifically from wealth, power and prestige. Individuals who have consistently been deprived of these three determinants are significantly disadvantaged from health inequiti ...

worldwide. In 2013 he was named Officer of the

Order of Canada The Order of Canada (french: Ordre du Canada; abbreviated as OC) is a Canadian state order and the second-highest honour for merit in the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, after the Order of Merit. To coincide with the cen ...

for his efforts as "tireless contributor to global health".

Early life

Tugwell was born in Egypt and raised in India, Germany, and Hong Kong, due to his father having been an officer in the British Army.

Family life

Tugwell is married to Jane Tugwell and has one son (David) and one daughter (Laura).

Education and training

After earning his

medical degree A medical degree is a professional degree admitted to those who have passed coursework in the fields of medicine and/or surgery from an accredited medical school. Obtaining a degree in medicine allows for the recipient to continue on into special ...

at the Royal Free Hospital of the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

, Tugwell and his wife moved to Nigeria to pursue his research into liver disease. He returned to England three years later to start a family. In 1975, he emigrated to Canada, where he got a one-year job as chief resident in internal medicine at

McMaster University Medical School The Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, known as the McMaster University School of Medicine prior to 2004, is the medical school of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It is operated by the McMaster Faculty of Health Sciences. ...

. In there, a chance encounter with

David Sackett David Lawrence Sackett (November 17, 1934 – May 13, 2015) was an American-Canadian physician and a pioneer in evidence-based medicine. He is known as one of the fathers of Evidence-Based Medicine. He founded the first department of clinical ...

lead him to take a course in clinical epidemiology and enrolled in the master's program.

Career

A year after finishing his masters degree, Tugwell became a faculty member of the department of epidemiology, and two years later spent two five-year terms as chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at

. In 1991 he moved to Ottawa to become the Chairman of the Department of Medicine. After ten years in the position, he became the director of the Centre for Global Health at the

. In 2001 he was appointed as co-editor-in-chief for the

Journal of Clinical Epidemiology The ''Journal of Clinical Epidemiology'' is a peer-reviewed journal of epidemiology. The journal was originally established as the ''Journal of Chronic Diseases'' in 1955 as a follow-up to Harry S. Truman's 1951 Presidential Task Force on nationa ...

. Tugwell holds the Canada Research Chair in Health Equity at the University of Ottawa, focused on improving health for the world's poor. Tugwell has been instrumental in the creation of multinational collaborations in different clinical epidemiology areas. He was the founding director of the International Clinical Epidemiology Network Training Centre at McMaster University from 1982 to 1991, becoming later the Secretary of INCLEN's North American group (CanUSAClen). Tugwell is one of the founders of the Cochrane Collaboration, a nonprofit organization that conducts systematic reviews of health care interventions, diagnostic tests and prognostic studies. Tugwell was the chair of the first annual Cochrane Colloquium in Oxford, UK, in 1993. This same year he became the founding co-ordinating editor of Cochrane Musculoskeletal. In 2005 he registered the Campbell and Cochrane Equity Methods group to promote a better reporting of the effects of interventions not only on the general population, but also on the disadvantaged in order to build the evidence base of interventions that could reduce health inequities. In 1992, together with Maarten Boers they sparked the creation of OMERACT, an organization that "strives to improve endpoint outcome measurement through a data driven, iterative consensus process involving relevant stakeholder groups". OMERACT is the pioneer organization promoting core outcome sets in clinical trials. Tugwell has published more than 1000 papers and make it to the top one-percent World Highly Cited Researchers Listing in social sciences created by Web of Science in 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Notable awards and honours

Tugwell is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. In 2008 he received the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Michael Smith Prize as Canada's 2008 Health Researcher of the Year for Health Services and Systems and Population Health Research. In 2013 he was awarded as Officer of the

for "his contributions as an epidemiologist reducing global disparities in health care access". In 2020 he received the 2020 CIHR Barer-Flood Prize that honours and recognizes an exceptional researcher in the area of health services and policy research.

Selected textbooks

* Tugwell P, Boers M, Simon L, Strand V, Wells G, Shea B, Brooks P. Evidence-based rheumatology. London: BMJ books, 2005. *Haynes RB, Tugwell P, Sackett DL, Guyatt GH. Clinical Epidemiology: How to Do Clinical Practice Research, Third Edition. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins, 2005.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tugwell, Peter 1944 births Living people Officers of the Order of Canada University of Ottawa faculty Alumni of the University of London McMaster University alumni McMaster University faculty Cochrane Collaboration people Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada British expatriates in Nigeria Canada Research Chairs English emigrants to Canada British expatriates in Egypt British expatriates in India British expatriates in Germany British expatriates in Hong Kong