Peter Tugwell

In 2013 he was awarded as Officer of the Order of Canada 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.

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 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.

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 McMaster University Medical School. 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 University of Ottawa. In 2001 he was appointed as co-editor-in-chief for the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.

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.

After earning his medical degree at the Royal Free Hospital of the University of London, 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. In there, a chance encounter with David Sackett lead him to take a course in clinical epidemiology and enrolled in the master's program.

Peter Tugwell FRCPC OC (born March 30, 1944) is a Canadian physician and Professor in the Department of Medicine and School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa. He is known for promoting clinical epidemiology and championing for health equity worldwide. In 2013 he was named Officer of the Order of Canada for his efforts as "tireless contributor to global health".