Dr. James Aw

Chief Medical Officer

Dr. James Aw is the Chief Medical Officer of OMERS where he provides medical expertise on health and wellness for employees, plan members, portfolio companies and investments in healthcare.

Dr. Aw is part time faculty in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins University (2011-present) in Baltimore, USA. He has over 20 years of experience in corporate health and occupational medicine including disability management, critical incident planning, infectious diseases in the workplace, industrial hygiene, wellness and disease management programs.

In June 2020 he was appointed to the Joint Ministers Roundtable, part of the governance structure providing guidance and oversight to the Ontario Health Data Platform on COVID-19 research.

Previously, Dr. Aw was the Chief Medical Advisor at Scotiabank (2006-2017) and the Chief Medical Officer of Medcan (2004-2019) where he spent 15 years overseeing the physician team and medical operations and currently continues as a senior medical consultant with an active primary care clinical practice in Toronto.

His clinical research interests are in preventive medicine and global health. Dr. Aw is a past executive committee member with the McLaughlin Centre for Genomic research, University of Toronto (2016-2019) and co-founder and board member of Naweza which is a non-profit organization focused on chronic disease prevention, Health technology and research in Africa. Dr. Aw has a Doctorate of Medicine (M.D.), School of Medicine degree from the University of Ottawa, and a post graduate degree in Occupational Health and Safety from McMaster University.