Ahmad Firas Khalid

Ahmad Firas Khalid is a medical doctor and a PhD graduate from the Health Policy PhD at McMaster University, having been supervised by Dr. John Lavis. He is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Government of Canada at Public Services and Procurement Canada, where he leads policy development initiatives to modernize the federal public service. Previously, he was a Senior Policy Advisor at the Public Health Agency of Canada, where he led the development of the agency’s External Advisory Committee on Science, supported integrating Indigenous knowledge into public health policy, and contributed to PHAC’s Science Strategy. His contributions earned him the 2024 PHAC Creativity, Innovation, and Service Delivery Award.

An adjunct professor at McGill and McMaster University, Firas specializes in health policy, system research, and knowledge mobilization. In addition to his PhD in Health Policy (McMaster) he holds a medical degree with research distinction (St. George’s University), and master’s degrees in Healthcare Management (McGill) and Health Professions Education (Ottawa).

Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at York University’s School of Global Health, a Board Member at Doctors Without Borders Canada, and a Senior Research Manager at Evidence Aid, where he helped develop the WHO Knowledge Hub on emergency disaster research. He also worked with PAHO on Resilient Health Systems and was a CIHR Health System Impact Fellow and Mitacs Elevate Fellow, supporting real-time evidence use in humanitarian practice at the Canadian Red Cross.

While a student a McMaster University, Firas was an outbound Queen Elizabeth Scholar in Strengthening Health Systems. He completed an internship at Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in the United Kingdom, where his work focused on how health systems react to crisis situations in low- and middle-income countries.

Firas was also a Queen Elizabeth Scholar in Strengthening Health and Social Systems where he travelled to Beirut (Lebanon) to intern at one of the McMaster Health Forum partners - Knowledge to Policy Center at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon) - on research that examined Lebanon’s health-system response to the Syrian refugee crisis.