Ross Upshur

Ross Upshur received BA (Hons.) and MA degrees in philosophy before receiving his MD from McMaster University in 1986. After seven years of rural primary care practice he returned to complete his M.Sc. in epidemiology and fellowship training in Community Medicine and Public Health at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Upshur is currently the Head of the Division of Clinical Public Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Scientific Director at the Bridgepoint Collaboratory for Research and Innovation, and Assistant Director of the Lunenfeld Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health System. At the University of Toronto, he is a Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Department of Family and Community Medicine, affiliate member of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.

In 2015, Dr. Upshur was named one of the Top 20 Pioneers in Family Medicine Research and Family Medicine Researcher of the Year, by the College of Family Physicians of Canada. Dr. Upshur is the former Director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics (2006 to 2011) and was Canada Research Chair in Primary Care Research (2005 to 2015). He is a member of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and the College of Family Physicians of Canada. He was Chair of the Ethics Committee of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada from 2013 to 2017.

Dr. Upshur’s research focuses on the intersection of primary care and public health. 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 served on ethics committees for the Public Health Agency of Canada, the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders.

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