PERL is built on three core pillars:

Leadership & Learning

We are building a pipeline of future-ready crisis leaders through a pandemic fellowship program, mentorship with leaders across McGill and the PERL network, and community-based learning grounded in equity and action.

PERL will serve as one of the world’s leading centres for training the health leaders of the future by:

  • Leveraging an interdisciplinary approach to serve as a magnet for outstanding early-career scientists and clinicians from around the world
  • Providing opportunities for hands-on simulation training

Science & Evidence

Our work focuses on five interconnected streams that strengthen how we anticipate, prevent, and respond to health emergencies, with a central aim of shaping policy and practice in the “post-COVID” era.

  1. Pandemic prevention & risk anticipation

  2. Policy, governance & crisis infrastructure

  3. Data & systems innovation

  4. Equity & community resilience

  5. Trust, communication & crisis leadership

Convening & Collaboration

We connect people, tools, and ideas across sectors through problem-solving convenings with international experts, technical advising, and strategic partnerships at the local, national, and global levels.

Together, these pillars create a lab that does not just study emergencies, but rather shape how we act before, during, and after they occur.

“One of the lessons of the Ebola outbreak was that you have to prepare for the future while the crisis is going on.”

—Dr. Joanne Liu