René Simard, OC, FRSC (born 1935) is a Canadian physician, cancer researcher and university administrator.
Born in Montreal, Quebec, he received a Bachelor of Arts from College Saint-Laurent in 1956 and a Doctor of Medicine from the Université de Montréal in 1962. He did his residency in pathology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and he received a Doctor of Science from the University of Paris in 1968.
From 1993 to 1998, he was the rector of the Université de Montréal.
He is a co-author of On Being Human: Where Ethics, Medicine and Spirituality Converge.
In 1989, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.