Dr. Shemie’s area of specialty is organ replacement in critical illness. He is pediatric critical care physician and director of Extracorporeal Life Support program at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, McGill University.
His recent research interests have included the development and implementation of national ICU based organ donation strategies. He is the former chair of the Donation Committee of the Canadian Council for Donation and Transplantation.
In April 2003, he chaired a Canadian Forum entitled “From Severe Brain Injury to Neurological Determination of Death” which has developed new medical standards for brain death determination and organ donation in Canada for all age groups. In February 2004, he chaired a Canadian Forum entitled “Medical Management to Optimize Donor Organ Potential” which has developed national consensus guidelines to optimize organ donor function for the purposes of transplantation. In February 2005, he chaired a Canadian Forum on ‘Donation after Cardiocirculatory Death’. In December 2006, he was appointed as the Bertram Loeb Chair in Organ and Tissue Donation in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ottawa. The mandate of the Loeb chair is to provide research leadership in current and emerging issues related OTD, with an emphasis on collaborative interdisciplinary research (ethical, philosophical, religious, cultural, legal, technological and biomedical).