Marie-France Raynault began her career as a physician at the Montreal South Centre CLSC, where she practiced family medicine in conjunction with the emergency and obstetrics services at St. Luc’s Hospital in Montreal. She then joined the Department of Preventative Medicine at St. Luc’s Hospital and Switzerland’s Institute universitaire de médecine sociale et préventive de Lausanne. In 1999, she returned to Canada to found the Montreal Observatory of Health and Social Inequalities (l’Observatoire montréalais des inégalités sociales et de la santé).

In 2001, the Quebec Minister for Employment and Social Solidarity approached Dr. Raynault to take part in the government’s legislative efforts to eliminate social exclusion. She was asked to conduct research on the knowledge, attitudes, and implementing strategies to reduce poverty in Quebec and an analysis of national poverty reduction strategies, particularly from France and Switzerland.

Since 2001, Marie-France Raynault has been a professor at the University of Montreal’s Department of Social and Preventative Medicine, until December 2009 when she was appointed Dean. Since 2003, she leads the Léa Roback Research Centre on the social inequalities of health, one of the research centres of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research.