Dr. Peter Orris, a founding member of PNHP, is a professor and chief of Occupational and Environmental Medicine for the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System. He has been an attending physician in the Division of Occupational Medicine at the Stroger Hospital of Cook County (formerly Cook County Hospital) for over three decades, where he practiced and taught internal and occupational medicine on the teaching services. He maintains an active clinical and teaching practice and holds professorships as well in internal and preventive medicine at Rush University Medical College and the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. His research and teaching have focused on international health care systems, occupational and community effects of toxic chemicals, and more recently sustainable health care and climate change.
Dr. Orris has served as an adviser to many labor organizations, corporations, and nonprofit groups. On an international level he has been an adviser to the World Health Organization, Pan American Health Organization, World Medical Association, World Federation of Public Health Associations, and Health Care Without Harm. He has a long history of advocacy for the elimination of profits and racism in health care and opposing corporate policies that poison the environment of the developing world.
He an active member of the American Public Health Association, and serves on the Council of the Chicago Medical Society and as a delegate to the Illinois State Medical Society. Dr. Orris graduated Harvard College in 1967, Yale School of Public Health in 1970, and the Chicago Medical School of the Rosalind Franklin University in 1975.
