William Ghali

William Ghali is Vice-President (Research) at the University of Calgary, where he also serves as a Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Community Health Sciences and practices as a physician specializing in General Internal Medicine. His academic background includes an MD from the University of Calgary in 1990, postgraduate medical residency training and FRCP(C) certification from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 1994, and an MPH from Boston University School of Public Health in 1995, focusing on health services research and epidemiology. He completed a general internal medicine fellowship at Boston University. Dr. Ghali previously held the John A. Buchanan Chair in General Internal Medicine from 2003 to 2018 and served as Scientific Director of the O’Brien Institute for Public Health. He is co-director of the University of Calgary World Health Organization Collaborating Centre in Disease Classifications and Health Information and held a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Health Services Research for two five-year terms.

Dr. Ghali’s research program has attracted millions of dollars in peer-reviewed funding and centers on evaluating and improving health system performance to achieve better patient outcomes and greater efficiency. He has published more than 420 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including seminal works such as “Coding algorithms for defining comorbidities in ICD-9-CM and ICD-10 administrative data” (2005), “The Canadian Adverse Events Study: the incidence of adverse events among hospital patients in Canada” (2004), and “New ICD-10 version of the Charlson comorbidity index predicted in-hospital mortality” (2004). Under his leadership as Vice-President (Research) since March 2020, the University of Calgary has launched initiatives like the Institutes for Transdisciplinary Scholarship and the UCalgary Research Excellence Chairs program, achieved top 5 research institution status in Canada in 2021, and secured the largest research grant in its history through the Canada First Research Excellence Fund for One Child Every Child. Dr. Ghali is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada, was named the Canadian public health researcher with the highest publication H-index by the Globe and Mail in 2012, and recognized by Thomson-Reuters as among the top one percent of most highly cited researchers in his discipline.