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Abdallah Daar
Friday, July 18, 2008
University Health Network Professor
of Public Health Sciences and of Surgery at the University of
Toronto, Dr. Abdallah Daar is also Senior Scientist and Co-director
of the Program on Life Sciences, Ethics, and Policy at the McLaughlin-Rotman
Centre for Global Health, and Director of Ethics and Policy at
the McLaughlin Centre for Molecular Medicine. He is also a Senior
Fellow at the Massey College of the University of Toronto.
Following medical school in London, England, Dr. Daar went to
the University of Oxford, where he did postgraduate clinical
training in surgery and also in internal medicine, earned a doctorate
in transplant immunology/immunogenetics, and accomplished a fellowship
in transplantation. A clinical lecturer in Oxford for several
years before going to the Middle East to help start two medical
schools, he was the foundation Chair of Surgery in Oman for a
decade before moving to the University of Toronto in 2001. He
currently also works in various advisory or consulting capacities
with the UN, the World Health Organization, and UNESCO, and is
a member of the African Union High Level Panel on Modern Biotechnology.
He recently chaired the External Review Committee of the WHO/World
Bank/UNDP/UNICEF Special Program on Tropical Diseases Research
and Training. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada,
the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, the New York Academy
of Sciences, and a Senior Fellow of Massey College, University
of Toronto. A member of the Ethics Committee of the Human Genome
Organization, he holds the official world record for performing
the youngest cadaveric donor kidney transplant. His current
research interests are in ways of avoiding knowledge divides
and in the exploration of how genomics and other biotechnologies
can be used effectively to ameliorate global health inequities.
Dr. Daar has co-authored five
books focusing on tumor markers; surgical radiology; ethical,
legal, and social issues in organ transplantation; bio-industry
ethics; and nutritional genomics, and has published over 300
works in immunology, immunogenetics, organ transplantation, surgery,
and bioethics. He is currently working on a book on life sciences
and development.
Honored throughout the world,
in 1999 Dr. Daar was awarded the Hunterian Professorship of the
Royal College of Surgeons of England, and in 2005 he was awarded
the Anthony Miller Prize for Research Excellence at the University
of Toronto. Most notably for him as well as for Chautauqua,
in 2005 Abdallah Daar was honored with the UNESCO Avicenna Prize
for Ethics of Science, the cash prize for which he donated to
Chautauqua as the first gift for the hoped-for Muslim House here
at Chautauqua. |
