GHEM Fellowship Program

The Global Health Emergency Medicine (GHEM) Fellowship program helps emergency medicine clinicians develop the appropriate skills, knowledge and experiences, to become leaders in the Global Health arena. Through this process, our fellows are able to develop and implement educational, programmatic and research initiatives, benefitting vulnerable populations around the globe.

This fellowship is one of its kind and one of the firsts in Canada. We select one to two fellows per year, and each fellow can choose a curated curriculum which includes 1/3 field work, 1/3 education and research, and 1/3 clinical work.

Fellows can choose to complete this fellowship in 1 or 2 years, based on prior experiences and educational achievements. Fellows can choose to amalgamate their global health focus with one of the following sub-fields of interest: Systems Development, POCUS, Trauma, Disaster/Humanitarian Relief, Innovations, Research, Pre-Hospital Care and Emergency Medicine Training. We have established partnerships with TAAAC, MSF and HHI. Our fellowship is housed at the Emergency Department at University Health Network in Toronto, Canada.

Past Fellows

2023-2024

Dr. Sara Alavian

Sara Alavian is an emergency medicine physician and assistant clinical professor at McMaster University. She completed her fellowship in Global Health and Emergency medicine at the University of Toronto, and received a Diploma of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in 2024. Her academic interests include health equity and global health. On a national level, she served on the CAEP Anti-racism and Anti-Colonialism Committee developing guidelines for anti-racism and anti-colonialism in the emergency department. At McMaster, she has focused on developing clinical resources for interacting with patients who are incarcerated and standardizing care for sickle cell patients in the ED. Her interest in global health involves knowledge translation, curriculum-sharing and capacity-building in low-resource settings for delivery of excellent emergency medicine care.

2023-2024

Dr. Arjun Sithamparapillai

Arjun is an emergency physician and trauma team leader at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. He completed his MSc in Global Health at McMaster University and his medical school, EM residency, and Global Health Fellowship at the University of Toronto. Throughout his training, Arjun found his niche in trauma capacity building through education and collaboration. He bridged his experiences at a level 1 trauma centre to northern Ontario through creation of a trauma checklist as well as internationally through the TAAAC-EM collaboration in Ethiopia. On a provincial level, outside of collaborations with the North, he serves as the ED Trauma Liaison at Lakeridge Health as they seek to become a trauma centre. He also continues to remain passionate about medical education as he teaches trauma, global health, and emergency medicine at the University of Toronto.

2022-2023

Dr. Matt Douglas-Vail

Matt was the inaugural GHEM Fellow during his PGY5 residency year in emergency medicine at the University of British Columbia. He was and continues to be involved in projects in Ethiopia, Liberia and Northern British Columbia centered around point-of-care-ultrasound in resource limited settings as well as climate change and its effect on vulnerable populations. Now that he has completed his fellowship, Matt is working as a staff physician at Vancouver General Hospital and BC Children’s Hospital. At Vancouver General Hospital he will also supervise and lead Canada’s first social emergency medicine elective.

Fellowship Co-Directors

Hiren Patel

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Hiren Patel, MD, MPH, is an emergency medicine physician at University Health Network. He is an assistant professor at University of Toronto, Global Health Fellowship Co-Director and practices clinically at Toronto General and Toronto Western Hospital. He completed his Masters in Public Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Before joining the University Health Network team, he was the Director of Global Health Fellowship and the Senior Advisor for the Division of Global Health and Human Rights at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. His global health focus is on international emergency medicine education and development, relief management and sustainable systems building as well as bridging the private and public sectors in this arena. Some of his work includes emergency medicine pre-hospital systems development in Ghana, emergency first aid response management in South Africa, emergency medicine education, training and systems building in Kenya, emergency disaster response and trauma stabilization in Iraq, as well as numerous other global health and humanitarian work. He is on various International Emergency Medicine boards, is a reviewer for three International Emergency Medicine journals, is the co-editor for GEM EM Cases and has had several publications focusing on emergency care capacity building in low resource settings. In addition, he is also the Co-Medical Director of MyTown Health, a conglomerate of urgent care practices in Massachusetts and is the program director of BostonMD, a concierge travel medicine organization.

Alexandra Stefan

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Dr. Alexandra Stefan is an emergency physician at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and University Health Network. She is assistant professor in the Division of Emergency Medicine at the University of Toronto. She completed her Masters of Science in Health Professions Education at the University of Toronto. She is currently the Global Health Fellowship Co-Director, as well as the Wellness and EDI Co-Lead for the Emergency Physician group at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. Her non-clinical interests are in medical education (in particular, simulation) and physician wellness. She has a longstanding involvement in the Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration both as a delegate as well as in administrative roles.

Application Materials

Interested in the GHEM Fellowship?

Applications for the 2025/2026 are now open and due September 20, 2024.

The full application can be found here.

If you have any questions, please contact GHEM Program Manager Hannah Girdler (hgirdler@gemcentre.ca) to learn more.