Dr Fares Al-Ali is the first Canadian and American board-certified emergency physician from the United Arab Emirates. He completed the Royal College 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 obtained his DrPH in Health Care Management and Leadership from the same school (May 2021).

Dr Fares Al-Ali is former Head of the ED and the former Program Director at Zayed Military Hospital. He is the founder and former chairman of the Trauma System Initiative of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and also the founder and past president of the Emirates Society of Emergency Medicine (ESEM). Dr Fares Al-Ali was able to establish several key initiatives including the first official Trauma Registry in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi,  Abu Dhabi STEMI network involving the different stakeholders, as well as the approval of the UAE “Good Samaritan Law”, which is considered the first law of its kind in an Arab Country. He led the ESEM Conference to be the largest Emergency Conference in the MENA region and successfully hosted the ICEM21 for the first time in the MENA region, with over 2500 delegates. He was recently appointed as the Executive Director of the Center of Emergency Preparedness and Response (CEPAR) at the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi in April 2021. Dr Fares Al-Ali has contributed to several international textbooks and peer-reviewed articles in the field of EM, EMS and Disaster Medicine, and has presented in several conferences regionally and internationally.