Haile T. Debas was born in
Asmara in 1937. Following undergraduate training at the
University College of Addis Ababa, he received his M.D. from
McGill University in 1963 and completed his surgical training at the
University of British Columbia. His postgraduate training included a year as a research fellow at the University of Glasgow/Western Infirmary in Scotland and two years at UCLA as a Medical Research Council Scholar in gastrointestinal physiology. After a year in private practice in the
Yukon Territories and
British Columbia, he joined the surgery faculty of the
University of British Columbia from 1970 to 1980 and then served on the faculty of
UCLA (1980–1985) and the
University of Washington (1985–1987). In 1987, Debas came to UCSF as chair of the Department of Surgery. Debas served as Dean of the
UCSF School of Medicine from 1993–2003. In 1997, Haile T. Debas was appointed the seventh Chancellor of UCSF. Debas was the founding Executive Director of UCSF Global Health Sciences (GHS) since its establishment in 2003 until the appointment of
Jaime Sepúlveda in 2011. He is a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the
Institute of Medicine. He currently serves on the
United Nations Commission on HIV/AIDS and Governance in Africa and on the
Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy of the
National Academy of Sciences. ==References==