Philippe De Wals

Dr. Philippe De Wals is a Belgian-Canadian epidemiologist and public health specialist based in Quebec City, Quebec. He is notable in the COVID-19 pandemic due to his role in approving COVID-19 vaccines in Canada as a member of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI).

De Wals gained his Medical Degree and a Doctorate in Public Health in his home country of Belgium, at the Louvain Catholic University.

De Wals is a medical advisor to the Institut national de santé publique du Québec.

Between 1980 and 2000 he worked as an epidemiologist for EUROCAT, a European network of population-based registries for the epidemiological surveillance of congenital anomalies.

In 1990, De Wals moved to Canada and became the Head of the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Sherbrooke. He is a researcher at the Sherbrooke University Hospital Centre.

In 1997, he was appointed visiting Professor at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States of America.

De Wals is a professor at the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at Laval University.¹⁾

De Wals is a member of the research center at Quebec University Hospital.

In 2011, he was appointed as Scientific Director of the Evaluation Platform on Obesity Prevention at the Quebec Heart and Lung Institute.

De Wals is a member of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI), where he participated in the approval of COVID-19 vaccines in Canada.²⁾