Dr. John Frank

Dr. John Frank is former director of the Scottish Collaboration for Public Health Research and Policy in Edinburgh, Scotland. He also holds a Chair in Public Health Research and Policy at the University of Edinburgh.

Frank was the founding director of research at the Institute for Work & Health in Toronto from 1991 until 1997, and was a senior scientist at the Institute until 2008. Frank was also a fellow with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Population Health Program.

Frank was provostial advisor on population health at the University of Toronto from 1994 to 1997. From 1997 to 2001, he was an adjunct professor at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received the Distinguished Teacher and Mentor of the Year Award. Over the period 2000-2008, he was the inaugural scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Institute of Population and Public Health, located at the University of Toronto. Frank remains a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

From July 2008 until June 2018, he was director of the Scottish Collaboration for Public Health Research and Policy, a new Edinburgh-based unit funded by the Medical Research Council and the Scottish Chief Scientist Office. The collaboration seeks 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. In 2013, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in honour of his lifetime scientific contributions.

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. As a physician-epidemiologist with special expertise in prevention, his main area of interest is the biopsychosocial determinants of health status and of health inequalities by social position, at the population level.