Nigel Rawson

Expert Overview

Dr. Nigel Rawson is a pharmacoepidemiologist and pharmaceutical policy researcher based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He is also a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute.

He has performed epidemiologic studies of the use of drugs and their outcomes for over 40 years and published more than 140 chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals and a monograph on drug safety. He has also given numerous invited presentations in many countries.

Educated in the United Kingdom, he holds an MSc in statistics and a PhD in pharmacoepidemiology. He held academic research positions in the Universities of London and Southampton in the United Kingdom until the end of 1989, when he became a research scientist at the University of Saskatchewan and later Merck Frosst/MRC Research Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology. He was subsequently Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His research activities in Canada focused on population-based studies of the use and safety of drugs using administrative healthcare utilization data and the evaluation of issues impacting Canadians’ access to new medicines.

He was a founding member of the Canadian Association for Population Therapeutics whose mission is to advance population-based research of therapeutic interventions to improve the health outcomes of Canadians. He was the association’s president in 2009 and is now an Honored Life Member

He has also been a senior researcher in an independent research centre in one of the United States’ largest health insurance companies, where he collaborated with the Food and Drug Administration on drug safety studies, and GlaxoSmithKline’s only epidemiologist in Canada providing advice and analysis for the company’s existing and developing medicines and vaccines.

Between 2012 and 2020, he was president of Eastlake Research Group whose mission was to create data-driven responses to pharmaceutical policy issues. He continues this work as an independent researcher.