Riyad Abu-Laban

Dr. Riyad B. Abu-Laban is an Emergency Physician at Vancouver General Hospital, Professor in the UBC Department of Emergency Medicine (DEM), and Scientific Director of the BC Emergency Medicine Network. He holds a MHSc in epidemiology from UBC, and has a wide range of publications including first authorship on randomized trials published in the NEJM and Lancet, and authorship of 3 EM textbook chapters. Dr. Abu-Laban has a longstanding commitment to the advancement of Emergency Medicine as an academic discipline in Canada and internationally. His professional contributions include 10 years as Senior Associate Editor for the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine, 8 years as a member of the Royal College Emergency Medicine Specialty Committee, participation as one of seven members on the Collaborative Working Group on the Future of Emergency Medicine in Canada, and ongoing membership on both the Governance and Specialty Implementation Committees of the International Federation for Emergency Medicine.

As DEM Research Director from 2009-2020, Dr. Abu-Laban provided academic mentorship to numerous DEM trainees, faculty members and career award recipients, and has taught on clinical trials for the VCHRI Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation where he is a Research Associate. In 2011 he developed and launched an innovative one month research education program for UBC Royal College Emergency Medicine Residents called the “Novel Education in Research & Design (NERD) Block”. The NERD Block expanded in 2012 to include Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellows and EM Faculty Member students, and has continued annually. This program has received consistently high evaluations, and has generated significant national attention. In 2013 Dr. Abu-Laban published a mixed outcomes evaluation study on the NERD Block in CJEM.

Dr. Abu-Laban currently oversees a wide range of activities in the EM Network Scientific Program related to data access and the functioning of the EMN as a Learning Health System. His most recent first author publications include a study on the relationship between Canadian medical student career interest in EM and post-graduate training disposition (Canadian Medical Education Journal, 2017), an overview on the background and structure of the recently-launched BC Emergency Medicine Network (Cureus, 2018), a paper on the process and findings informing the development of the BC Emergency Medicine Network (Healthcare Management Forum, 2019) and an editorial on the evolution of emergency medicine internationally (CJEM, 2020).