Jack Tu


Jack Ven Tu was a Taiwanese-born Canadian cardiologist.
Born in Taipei on 1 March 1965, he graduated from the University of Western Ontario Medical School, then obtained a M.Sc at the University of Toronto. His doctoral dissertation, completed at Harvard University, was titled Quality of Cardiac Surgical Care in Ontario, Canada. Upon earning his Ph.D in 1996, Tu began working for Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre while teaching at the University of Toronto. He was later named a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Health Services Research at the University of Toronto and made a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Tu died at the age of 53 on 30 May 2018.

Early life and education

Tu was born in Taipei, Taiwan to parents Jun-bi and Beth. His father was a psychiatrist who took on a position at Queen's University at Kingston upon the family's immigration to Canada when Tu was two. He showed an early interest in the medical sciences and competed in regional and national science fairs as a student. He finished high school in four years instead of five, was accepted to medical school after just one year of undergraduate studies and graduated the youngest of his medical school class in 1988 at the age of 23. He completed his residency in internal medicine at the Toronto General Hospital.