Pierre Côté is a Professor of Epidemiology in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ontario Tech University, where he holds the Hann-Kelly Family Chair in Disability and Rehabilitation Research. From 2013 to 2023, he held the prestigious Canada Research Chair in Disability Prevention and Rehabilitation.
Côté is the founding Director of the Institute for Disability Prevention and Rehabilitation (IDRR), a leading international research hub that aims to improve the functioning and quality of life of people with disabilities or rehabilitation needs. He is also the inaugural Director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre on Rehabilitation and Musculoskeletal Health. Professor Côté currently serves as Lead of the Cochrane Rehabilitation Methodological Group.
Dr. Côté holds appointments at several international universities. He is a Professor of Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto; Adjunct Professor of Disability Prevention at the University of Southern Denmark; Honorary Professor of Physiotherapy at MGM Institute of Health Sciences, India; and Visiting Professor of Health Promotion Sciences at Sophiahemmet University, Sweden.
Throughout his career, Côté has published more than 425 peer-reviewed papers. His current Scopus h-index is 73, and his Google Scholar h-index is 91. Professor Côté has also supervised more than 60 master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral trainees.
A major part of his research has been on musculoskeletal disorders, in particular back and neck pain, which are global public health challenges, driving disability, healthcare costs, and lost productivity. At the seminar he will give a keynote lecture exploring how causal thinking, and modern epidemiological methods can refine our understanding of back and neck pain, support more effective and equitable interventions, and ultimately reshape musculoskeletal health policy.
Musculoskeletal conditions are among the leading causes of disability worldwide, placing a substantial burden on individuals, healthcare systems, and societies. Despite decades of epidemiological research and hundreds of clinical trials, important gaps remain in our ability to prevent disability, improve recovery, and deliver effective rehabilitation.
Randomized controlled trials are essential for testing causal hypotheses about the effectiveness and safety of interventions. However, many important causal questions cannot be adequately addressed through randomized experiments because they are unethical, infeasible, or poorly suited to complex, real-world settings. Observational research offers opportunities to address these questions, but distinguishing causal effects from associations requires rigorous study designs and explicit assumptions.
This keynote will argue that advancing musculoskeletal rehabilitation requires a broader approach to causal inference, guided by a fundamental question: What would happen if we intervened differently? Drawing on counterfactual reasoning, directed acyclic graphs, and target trial emulation, the lecture will explore how experimental and observational research can complement one another to generate trustworthy causal evidence about treatment effectiveness, safety, and rehabilitation outcomes.
Ultimately, the challenge is not simply to produce more research, but to generate evidence about what we can change, for whom, and under what circumstances, to improve functioning, prevent disability, and enable participation.
Karin Magnusson is a Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and an Associate Researcher at Lund University, Sweden. She has extensive experience studying a broad range of communicable and non-communicable diseases, with expertise in applying advanced epidemiological and registry-based methods to enhance understanding of disease etiology and prognosis across various settings and diagnoses.
