He was born and raised in rural Newfoundland. In 1977 he graduated from Memorial University Medical School and then went on to complete his residency in Family Medicine at Dalhousie University in 1979. He is a certificant and a fellow of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. In 1998 he completed a Masters of Community Health and Epidemiology at Queen’s University. In 2000/2001 he spent a year as research fellow at the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford and he was involved in a medical education project in Bosnia from 1997 – 2009. He has been part of the CPCSSN project since its inception in 2008. He is Director of the Atlantic Practice Based Research Network (APBRN), one of the founding networks of CPCSSN.