Tyler Williamson renewed as director of the Centre for Health Informatics

I am pleased to announce that Dr. Tyler Williamson, BSc'05, PhD'11, has been renewed as director of the Centre for Health Informatics (CHI) for a second term, effective July 2026.

The decision follows a thorough review, including a 360-degree assessment of Dr. Williamson's leadership and a formal evaluation of CHI's performance over the past four years. Dr. Williamson also presented an ambitious five-year plan for the Centre. The case for renewal was clear.

Under Dr. Williamson's leadership, CHI has grown from six affiliated faculty in 2022 to twenty-seven today. CHI has become core enabling infrastructure for data-driven scholarship across the Cumming School of Medicine (CSM). Affiliated faculty have secured $60.2 million in research funding over this period. Their collective scholarly output — 1,723 manuscripts drawing 72,427 citations, with collaborations spanning 120 countries — has been enabled by the research environment Dr. Williamson has built.

The impact extends well beyond those numbers. The Alberta COVID-19 Tracker, built in under a week and still in active use today, showedwhat a well-led health informatics centre can do for a province in crisis. CHI's policy contributions through Networked Health have positioned the University of Calgary as an active architect of Canada's national digital health strategy. And CHI's role in VITAL, a roughly $100 million federal initiative to modernize health data infrastructure across three provinces, will support the Centre's continued growth.

Dr. Williamson has also navigated significant organizational complexity with care and fiscal discipline. The absorption of the Clinical Research Unit in March 2024 and the ongoing integration with W21C Research and Innovation Centre were neither simple nor low-risk undertakings, and CHI's core service delivery has remained steady throughout.

Looking ahead, Dr. Williamson's five-year plan sets a clear direction for CHI's next chapter. A central priority is collaborating with our health system partners in transforming health data access and infrastructure — ensuring that researchers across CSM have the data assets, governance frameworks, and technical capacity to pursue high-impact science. Alongside this, CHI will deepen its role as an integrated research support hub, providing the analytic, methodological, and operational backbone that allows faculty-led programs to compete at the national and international level. As the research programs of CHI-affiliated faculty grow in scale and ambition, CHI's infrastructure and expertise will be there to support them. The plan also invests in growing Alberta's next generation of health informatics leaders, ensuring that the capacity being built today has lasting depth. With CHI's Operational Plan launching later in 2026, this is a pivotal moment for the Centre, and we are fortunate to have Dr. Williamson continuing to lead it.

Please join me in congratulating Tyler on this well-deserved renewal.

Sincerely,

Dr. Braden Manns, MD

Senior Associate Dean (Clincal Research), CSM

Associate Vice-President (Health Research), UCalgary