Dr. Chad Ball is a Professor of surgery and oncology at the University of Calgary. He currently practices Hepatobiliary, Pancreas, Trauma and Acute Care Surgery at the Foothills Medical Centre (quaternary care regional referral facility). He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta (honors physiology), graduate degree at the University of British Columbia (MSc), medical school at the University of Toronto, general surgery residency at the University of Calgary, trauma and surgical critical care fellowships at Emory University and the University of Cape Town, and his HPB fellowship at Indiana University. He is also a ‘Top 40 Under 40’ alumni for the city of Calgary.
Dr. Ball has over 400 peer-reviewed publications, 65 book chapters, and has written/edited surgical textbooks on arresting life-threatening hemorrhage, as well as technical approaches to HPB surgery. He is also the associate editor of the ninth edition of the industry reference textbook TRAUMA. He is the Editor-in-Chief of both the Canadian Journal of Surgery, as well as the Evidence-Based Reviews in Surgery (EBRS) program. He is an international speaker on a broad range of surgical and resuscitation topics with over 350 presentations and guest lectureships. He currently serves on the editorial board of more than a dozen high impact, peer-reviewed journals. His research areas of interest include clinical injury care, hybrid operating environments, parabolic spaceflight surgery, randomized controlled trials within both HPB and trauma surgery. He holds/has held numerous large research grants in the areas of pancreatic/hepatic surgical complications, abdominal wall reconstruction, and ongoing traumatic hemorrhage.
Dr. Ball is on a broad range of surgical society executive committees, as well as the current President of the Canadian HepatoPancreatoBiliary Association. He also remains the director for both the HPB and acute care surgery fellowship programs at the University of Calgary, in addition to supervising multiple graduate students. Dr. Ball is a founding member of C.H.A.P.P.S. This center is an organization devoted to funding research and improving outcomes for current and future cancer patients. He is also a founding board member of the annual Trauma Conference International (TCI)(www.traumacon.org) which is a trans Americas simulcast-based continuing medical education conference which empowers technology to deliver trauma content to countries and sites who could not afford to travel to meetings. Dr. Ball is the host of the International podcast Cold Steel (https://canjsurg.ca/podcasts) that discusses current issues in surgery, career development and continuing surgical education