Dr. William Ghali is the Scientific Director of the O’Brien Institute for Public Health at the University of Calgary. He is also a Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary, and a practicing physician specialized in Internal Medicine. He is a principal in the University of Calgary World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre in Disease Classifications and health information. He recently completed two terms as a Canada Research Chair in Health Services Research, and has also been funded as a Senior Health Scholar by Alberta Innovates Health Solutions. Clinically, he is trained as a General Internist (MD [1990] – University of Calgary, FRCP(C) [1994] – Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario), and completed methodological training in health services research and epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health (MPH [1995]).

Dr. Ghali’s research program is in the general area of health services research and his work focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to evaluating and improving health system performance to produce better patient outcomes and improved system efficiency.  He leads or co-leads three inter-related research and innovation initiatives:  1) the Alberta Provincial Project for Outcome Assessment in Coronary Heart Disease (APPROACH – see www.approach.org);  2) W21C initiative; and 3) the International Methodology Consortium for Coded Health Information (IMECCHI – www.imecchi.org), with strong linkages to the World Health Organization. These three initiatives share the overriding goal of enhancing the use of health information to produce applicable knowledge on system performance and patient outcomes, and through knowledge translation, tangible health system improvements.

Dr. Ghali has held millions of dollars of peer-reviewed research funding from various agencies, and has published over 390 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He has received numerous awards, including a Canadian Top 40 Under 40 Award from the Caldwell Group (2006), the David Sackett Senior Investigator Award from the Canadian Society of Internal Medicine, and Distinguished Alumni Awards from both the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Medicine (2009) and the Boston University School of Public Health (2001). He was featured recently by the Globe and Mail (April 2012) as the Canadian public health researcher with the highest publication H-index, and is also named in the Thomson-Reuters listing of the top 1% of most highly cited researchers by discipline.