Dr. Ross Upshur is the new Head of Division of Clinical Public Health
September 13/2013
From the Dean:
Dear DLSPH Faculty, Students, Staff, Alumni and other stakeholders,
I am extremely pleased to announce another key development in academic leadership within DLSPH. As of this month, Dr. Ross Upshur has become the Head of our Division of Clinical Public Health. This innovative new Division has the goal of being the world leader in developing, testing, evaluating and teaching approaches to integrating public health, preventive medicine and primary care as part of the sustainable health system of the future. It is the home of our training programs in Community Nutrition, Health Practitioner Teacher Education, Wound Prevention and Care, and Public Health for Family & Community Medicine and Addictions & Mental Health. It also is the new home of our Public Health & Preventive Medicine Residency, our planned MD-MPH program and many other initiatives.
Dr. Upshur is known to most of you as a long-time outstanding scholar in primary care, bioethics, global health, and many other domains that are critically important to our School’s mission. In addition to leading our Division of Clinical Public Health, he will continue as the Canada Research Chair in Primary Care Research. Below is a brief biography of this remarkable leader. Please welcome him into his new role.
About Dr. Ross Upshur
Ross Upshur received BA (Hons.) and MA degrees in philosophy before receiving his MD from McMaster University in 1986. After 7 years of rural primary care practice he returned to complete his MSc in epidemiology and fellowship training in Community Medicine and Public Health at the University of Toronto. He is currently the Medical Director, Clinical Research, Bridgepoint Health.
Dr. Upshur is the Canada Research Chair in Primary Care Research. At the University of Toronto he is a Professor at the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Adjunct Scientist at the Institute of Clinical Evaluative Sciences, an affiliate of the Institute of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and a member of the Centre for Environment. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Geography and Earth Sciences and Associate Member of the Institute of Environment and Health at McMaster University. He is the former Director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics (2006-2011) and was a staff physician at the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre from 1998-2013. He is a member of The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and the College of Family Physicians of Canada.
His research focuses on the intersection of primary care and public health particularly with respect to the interrelationship between ethics and evidence. His current interests include managing complex chronic disease in aging adults, clinical measurement, the concept of evidence in health care, philosophy of medicine including medical epistemology and the integration of ethics and clinical reasoning, public health ethics, global health ethics, empirical approaches in bioethics, primary care research methods, time series applications in health services research, communicable disease and environmental epidemiology. He has held numerous grants from the CIHR. He has over 300 publications including more than 180 peer reviewed publications spanning these domains.
At the University of Toronto, he has designed and taught courses in the graduate, post graduate and undergraduate curriculum in ethics, epidemiology and the philosophy of medicine as well as supervising and co supervising over 75 graduate students and post graduate research students. He is a clinical supervisor in the post graduate Family Medicine Residency program, having been core supervisor for 15 postgraduate trainees in family medicine.
He has been active on Advisory Boards for the International Joint Commission, Doctors Without Borders, and Scidev.net, several medical journals and consulted with the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges in Global Health. In 2008 he was named the Academic Family Physician of the Year and Researcher of the Year by the Department of Family and Community Medicine and received the John Hastings Award for Excellence in Service to the University and Community from the Department of Public Health Sciences.