Mike Wilson

Mike provides leadership for the many scientific activities at the forum, which are focused on harnessing and contextualizing the best-available evidence along with citizen values and stakeholder insights to strengthen health and social systems and get the right programs, services and products to the people who need them.

A centrepiece of this work is the Forum’s rapid response program, which Mike created and continues to lead. Through this program, Mike and the Forum’s scientific team produce timely and demand-driven contextualized evidence syntheses that address pressing health and social system issues faced by decision-makers. This includes evidence syntheses produced within days (e.g., rapid evidence profiles or living evidence profiles), weeks (e.g., rapid syntheses that combine policy, system and/or political analyses) and months (e.g., systematic reviews or living evidence syntheses that are updated and enhanced over time). Mike also leads projects designed to strengthen evidence-support systems, enable horizon scanning to identify and prioritize innovations to strengthen health and social systems, and spark action by convening citizen panels to identify citizens’ values and preferences and stakeholder dialogues to support collective problem solving among government policymakers, system and organizational leaders, professional leaders and citizens.

Mike co-teaches (with Forum Director, John Lavis) an undergraduate course about health systems and policy for the Bachelor of Health Sciences (Honours) program at McMaster, and contributes to the Health Policy PhD Program as the lead for the political studies field, as a member of the program executive and admissions committees, a supervisor for several doctoral students and as a seminar instructor.

He holds a BHSc. (Honours) from McMaster University, studied political science at the University of Toronto, and completed a PhD in the Health Research Methodology Program as well as a diploma in Health Services and Policy Research at McMaster University.