For more than two decades, Dr. Khaled El Emam, University of Ottawa professor and CHEO Research Institute senior scientist, and his team at the Electronic Health Information Laboratory (EHIL) have been developing solutions that enable responsible use of health data for research, innovation and patient care.
El Emam is the recipient of the 2026 Global Privacy and Human Rights Award from the Global Privacy Assembly and Access Now. He’s helped shape the fields of privacy-enhancing technologies, synthetic data and medical AI, with applications for researchers, health-care organizations and policymakers.
From research to real-world impact
For El Emam, also director of the Ottawa Medical AI Research Institute, the award is especially meaningful.
“It's a reflection of all the work we've been doing for the last 22 years,” he says. “We try to transition our work into practice, so not just do the research side of this, but also take our results and make sure they are applied.”
El Emam and his collaborators have developed methods, tools and standards now used internationally to support responsible use of sensitive data. His team ensures that new technologies can be implemented in real-world settings, informing policy decisions, supporting health-care organizations and helping researchers access data safely.
This has also included creating spinoff companies that commercialize technologies developed through the EHIL research program.
The impact of El Emam’s work is often invisible to the public. Not focused on one single breakthrough, it exists in the systems and technologies that enable secure data sharing.
Two organizations that have used the results of this work (and were part off the recent award ceremony) are the Better Outcomes Registry and Network (BORN) Ontario and the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Both have applied privacy-preserving methods at scale to make health data available for research and policy-making.
El Emam’s recognition also highlights Canada’s growing leadership in privacy-preserving innovation. With increasing global competition, El Emam believes Canadian researchers are well positioned to continue leading.
Building trust through data innovation
Major health-care advances are often driven by access to data. The challenge is finding ways to use data for research without compromising individual privacy.
Much of El Emam’s work has focused on addressing this tension. Among the most promising of his approaches is synthetic data, which recreates the statistical properties of real datasets without exposing information about actual individuals.
As artificial intelligence increases demand for large volumes of data, these approaches are becoming even more important. Researchers need access to information to train models, evaluate treatments and improve health-care systems. At the same time, public confidence depends on strong safeguards.
For El Emam, innovation and privacy aren’t conflicting goals. “We can enable innovation, we can be competitive and we can still respect privacy,” he says.
“We can enable innovation, we can be competitive and we can still respect privacy.”
Dr. Khaled El Emam
— Professor, Faculty of Medicine
El Emam argues that maintaining public trust is essential. While some jurisdictions may prioritize (rapid) innovation over privacy protection, he believes sustainable progress requires balancing both. Canadians, he says, expect this.
Canada’s opportunity in the age of AI
The growth of AI has created both new opportunities and challenges. With data-driven innovations, access to high-quality data is becoming a strategic advantage.
For El Emam, privacy protection is not just a regulatory requirement. It’s also a way to support innovation and competitiveness.
Universities, research labs and companies that can use data securely and responsibly will be better positioned to advance discoveries and build public trust. While there’s room for improvement, he believes Canada is well placed to succeed. He sees the country’s privacy regulators and collaborative research environment as able to balance innovation, privacy and broader public interests. This also aligns with the Government of Canada’s broader focus on responsible AI, particularly in health care.
For, El Emam, while laws and policies remain important, privacy-protecting technologies can evolve more quickly in response to rapid advances in AI.
“I think technology is going to solve the problem. Protective technology can move as fast as the technologies that are consuming the data, whereas laws and policies take a long time to catch up.”
Data access and privacy don’t have to be opposing forces. Enabling both will be essential to unlocking medical breakthroughs while maintaining the public trust that makes those advances possible.
