Dr. Trevor Hancock is a public health phycisian and independent health promotion consultant working primarily for local communities, provincial and national governments, health care organizations and the World Health Organization. His main areas of interest are health promotion, healthy cities/communities, healthy public policy, environmental health, health policy and planning, and health futurism.

He has been actively involved in the public health movement in Canada, having been on the Board of Directors of the Ontario Public Health Association for a number of years, serving as President in 1986-1987. Honours he has received include Honourary Life Membership in the Canadian Public Health Association (1990); Canadian Vice-President of the American Public Health Association (1991-1992); an Honourary Award from the US Healthy Cities and Communities Coalition (1998); Life Membership in the Ontario Public Health Association (1999) and appointment as a Regents Lecturer at the School of Public Health, University of California at Berkeley (2000).

His major work in recent years has been in the area of healthy cities/communities, an area he helped to pioneer. He has consulted to healthy city/community projects in several countries (notably Sweden and the USA) as well as in Toronto and across Canada. He was the principal consultant for the Healthy Toronto 2000 project and has been a consultant to the Canadian and the WHO Europe Healthy Cities Projects.

He was the founding Chair of the Ontario Healthy Communities Coalition, was a member of the judges panel for the Healthcare Forum's "Healthier Communities Award" for four years and a member of the Advisory Committee for the Trillium Foundation's "Caring Communities Award" for three years. Dr. Hancock is particuarly interested in the health implications of public policy in non-health fields, and in what he calls healthy public policy. In 1984 he organized "Beyond Health Care" - a major national conference on healthy public policy and in 1986 led a CPHA study tour on the topic to the Nordic countries.

In recent years his views on the place of hospitals in their community and their role with respect to health promotion and healthy communities has led to consulting work with hospitals and to a number of articles and speeches on the topic, notably for the San Francisco - based Healthcare Forum. In partnership with Claude Halpin, he has established Planetree Canada to further develop the concept of healthy and health-promoting hospitals.

Dr. Hancock also has a longstanding interest in health and the environment, in the "conserver society" concept and the health and political implications of sustainable development. He was the first leader of the Green Party in Canada in the early 1980s. In 1989, he organized a national conference on health, environment and economy and continues to work to bring together the themes of health and sustainable development. He is a founder and Chair of the Board of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.

In addition to his interests in public health, Dr. Hancock has been described as among the ten best health futurists in the world. He coordinated the health and medicine track for the First Global Conference on the Future in Toronto in 1980 and was a founding member of Paradigm Health. He has consulted on health futures with the WHO, the Singapore Ministry of Health and the Canadian Medical Association, among others.

From 1986 to 2000 Dr. Hancock held a part-time appointment as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, Toronto where he taught graduate courses in health promotion, healthy cities and health and environment.

Dr. Hancock was an Associate Medical Officer of Health for the City of Toronto from 1981-1986. Previous positions included working as the health planner in the City of Toronto's Health Advocacy Unit; working as an epidemiologist for Peel Regional Health Unit; and family practice in a community health centre in Toronto and in rural New Brunswick.

Trevor Hancock was born in England in 1948. He received his medical training at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, England and a post-graduate degree in community health and epidemiology at the University of Toronto. He is the author or co-author of 6 short monographs, 28 book chapters, 35 refereed articles and numerous reports and other publications and has given dozens of major speeches, presentations and workshops.