Professor Abdallah Daar is at the University of Toronto, where he is Professor of Clinical Public Health and Global Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (DLSPH), and of Surgery in the Faculty of Medicine. He is a Member of the United Nations Secretary-General's Scientific Advisory Board; and was the founding Chair of the Board of the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases (2009-2011) and of the Advisory Board of the United Nations University International Institute of Global Health.
After medical schools in Uganda and London, England, he went to the University of Oxford where he did postgraduate clinical training in surgery and also in internal medicine, a doctorate in transplant immunology, and a fellowship in organ transplantation. He was a clinical lecturer in the Nuffield Dept. of Surgery at Oxford for several years before going to the Middle East to help start two medical schools. He was the foundation chair of surgery at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman for a decade before moving to the University of Toronto in 2001.
Professor Daar's academic career has spanned biomedical sciences, organ transplantation, surgery, global health, and bioethics. He works in various advisory or consulting capacities with the UN, the World Health Organization and UNESCO, and was a member of the African Union High Level Panel on Modern Biotechnology, and chaired the 4th External Review of the WHO/World Bank/UNDP/UNICEF Special Program on Tropical Diseases Research and Training. He is a member of UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee.
His international awards include the Patey Prize of the Surgical Society of Great Britain, the Hunterian Professorship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the UNESCO Avicenna Prize for Ethics of Science and the Anthony Miller Prize for Research Excellence at DLSPH, University of Toronto. He holds the official world record for performing the youngest cadaveric-donor kidney transplant. His major research focus is on the use of life sciences to ameliorate global health inequities, with a particular focus on building scientific capacity and increasing innovation in developing countries, in addition to studying how life sciences technologies can be rapidly taken from “lab to village”. He has published over 350 papers in peer-reviewed journals and as chapters in various books, and seven books. He published his seventh book, Garment of Destiny, in 2018.
Dr Daar is an Omani national based in Toronto.