Haile Debas

Haile Tesfaye Debas is an Eritrean physician and academic administrator at the University of California, San Francisco. Born in Asmara in 1937, he studied at University College of Addis Ababa, received his medical degree from McGill University in 1963 and trained in surgery at the University of British Columbia, with research fellowships in Glasgow and at the University of California, Los Angeles, in gastrointestinal physiology. After a year in private practice in the Yukon Territories and British Columbia, he taught surgery at the University of British Columbia from 1970 to 1980 and then at UCLA and the University of Washington. In 1987 he became chair of the Department of Surgery at UCSF, served as Dean of its School of Medicine from 1993 to 2003 and in 1997 was appointed its seventh Chancellor. He was founding executive director of UCSF Global Health Sciences from 2003 until 2011. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Institute of Medicine.