MORRIS BARER

Professor and Interim Co-Lead, Health Care Services and Systems, in the new School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia

Dr. Morris L. Barer is a (UBC). He is also the current (and was the founding) Director of the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at UBC. Until August 2006, he served as the first Scientific Director of the Institute of Health Services and Policy Research, Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Dr. Barer holds a PhD in Economics and an MBA from UBC.

His research interests include health care financing, health human resource policy (particularly physicians), direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription pharmaceuticals, and the determinants of changing trends in health care utilization.

Dr. Barer was the founding treasurer of the Canadian Health Economics Research Association, an Associate of the Population Health Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, served six years as one of the first-ever external (non-government) members of the Canadian Federal/Provincial/Territorial Advisory Committee on Health Services, and served five years as a senior editor with the international journal Social Science and Medicine.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s he and colleagues at UBC developed the B.C. Linked Health Database, a research resource that has found widespread use in health services and population health research for over a decade.

He played a leadership role in the establishment of the Canadian journal Healthcare Policy, first published in 2005. He was elected as a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2005 and was the 2006 recipient of the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation's Health Services Research Advancement Award.