Dr. Saleh Fares Al-Ali

Dr. Fares Al-Ali is the first Canadian and American board-certified emergency physician from the United Arab Emirates. He completed the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada Emergency Medicine Residency Program at McGill University in Montreal, Canada (2002-2007). In 2008, he completed a fellowship in EMS at the University of Toronto in Canada, followed by a Disaster Medicine Fellowship at BIDMC in Boston, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, as Harvard’s first Disaster Medicine fellow and as co-founder of the program (2009). In May 2011, he obtained his MPH from Johns Hopkins University and later his DrPH in Health Care Management and Leadership from the same institution (May 2021).

Dr. Fares Al-Ali is the former Head of the Emergency Department and former Program Director at Zayed Military Hospital, with extensive military medicine experience, including operational and civil-military deployments. He is the founder and former chairman of the Trauma System Initiative of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the founder and past president of the Emirates Society of Emergency Medicine (ESEM). Dr. Fares Al-Ali spearheaded key initiatives, including the first official Trauma Registry in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, the Abu Dhabi STEMI network involving various stakeholders, and the approval of the UAE “Good Samaritan Law,” the first of its kind in an Arab country. He led the ESEM Conference to become the largest Emergency Medicine Conference in the MENA region and successfully hosted ICEM 2021 in the region, with over 2,500 delegates. He also served as Executive Director of the Center for Emergency Preparedness and Response (CEPAR) at the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi, since COVID 19 pandemic until July 2024, where he developed a new integrated model of health emergency care (the Abu Dhabi Health Emergency Management – HEM Model). He currently serves as the Immediate Past President of the International Federation for Emergency Medicine. Dr. Fares Al-Ali has contributed to several international textbooks and peer-reviewed articles in the fields of Emergency Medicine, EMS, and Disaster Medicine and has presented at numerous conferences both regionally and internationally.