John Frank

From 2008 to 2018, Professor Frank was the founding Director of an Edinburgh-based Unit, funded by the Medical Research Council and the Scottish Chief Scientist Office: The Scottish Collaboration for Public Health Research and Policy. The Collaboration has sought to develop and robustly test novel public health policies and programs to equitably improve health status in Scotland, through the convening and ongoing support of researcher/research-user consortia.

Professor Frank trained in Medicine and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, in Family Medicine at McMaster University, and in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has held the following major positions: Professor (now Emeritus) at the University of Toronto, at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, since 1983; founding Director of Research at the Institute for Work & Health in Toronto from (1991-1997); and inaugural Scientific Director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research – Institute of Population and Public Health (2000-2008). From 2008 to 2018, he was the founding Director of an Edinburgh-based Unit, funded by the Medical Research Council and the Scottish Chief Scientist Office: The Scottish Collaboration for Public Health Research and Policy. The Collaboration has sought to develop and robustly test novel public health policies and programs to equitably improve health status in Scotland, through the convening and ongoing support of researcher/research-user consortia. Since 2008, Prof Frank has held a Personal Chair in Public Health Research and Policy in the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh, where he was also Director of Knowledge Exchange and Research Impact from 2017 to 2021, at which time he retired, and currently holds the post of Professorial Fellow, awaiting Emeritus status.

Prof Frank’s scientific expertise spans: the epidemiology and prevention of chronic (non-communicable) diseases, including obesity, and cardiovascular disease; the application of critical appraisal to the assessment of evidence for both clinical and public health interventions (especially preventive ones); social epidemiology, including the causes, consequences and remediation of socio-economic gradients in health status and health inequalities, focused on the Social Determinants of Health; global health, emphasizing primary health care systems in Africa, and the measurement/monitoring of health inequalities in those challenging environments; occupational epidemiology (especially low back pain at work) and environmental epidemiology (especially health effects of EMF exposure.)