Roos, Noralou P.

Noralou P. Roos is a professor at the University of Manitoba (Canada) and the founding director of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, where she is a senior researcher, having stepped down from the directorship in 2004. Her research interests include the use of administrative data for managing the healthcare system; the relationship between healthcare use and population health; and, most recently, the impact of early childhood experiences, education, community environment, and healthcare interventions on the health of children.

Roos received a bachelor's degree with distinction and departmental honors in political science from Stanford University in 1963. As a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellow, she earned a doctoral degree in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1968. Her first academic appointment was in political science at MIT. She then moved to a faculty position in the Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, [Page 1048]followed by a year as a medical program specialist and Sears-Roebuck Foundation Federal Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Health Services Research Development. In 1973, Roos joined the University of Manitoba as an associate and subsequently full professor in the Faculty of Administrative Studies (now the Asper School of Business) (1973–1988) and the Faculty of Medicine (1973 to present).

As founder of the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy and Evaluation (later called the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy), Roos established a prototype for successfully conducting research using administrative data. The Centre holds ano-nymized and linkable health administrative data for all health services provided within the province of Manitoba. Using these data, Roos and her colleagues have addressed many important questions about the health and healthcare of Manitobans, and their findings have been valuable not only in Manitoba but in other healthcare systems in Canada and elsewhere around the world.

Roos is an Institute for Scientific Information Highly Cited Researcher, placed in the top half of 1% of published scientists with over 2,800 citations. Her early work built on her doctoral research and focused on public administration in Turkey. Subsequently, she shifted her scholarship to evaluation and to evaluating health programs in particular. She has published over 200 scholarly articles and academic reports and has collaborated extensively with authors throughout North America and elsewhere in the world. She has published in journals such as American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, Health Services Research, Medical Care, Milbank Quarterly, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Social Science and Medicine.

Over the course of her career, Roos has received over $45 million in research support, including being continuously funded as a National Health Research Scientist from 1973 to 1998, an associate with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research from 1988 to 2002, and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Population Health Research from 2001 to the present. She was a member of the Prime Minister's National Health Forum from 1994 to 1997 and a member of the Medical Research Council from 1997 to 2000.

Her work and collaborations were recognized in 2001 through the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF) awarding the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy the Health Services Research Achievement Award. In 2005, Roos was the recipient of the Order of Canada in recognition of her lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to the community, and service to the nation.

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