James Maskalyk

James Maskalyk is a Canadian emergency medicine physician, author, DJ and meditation teacher.

He works at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, and is the strategic director of Toronto-Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration in Emergency Medicine, which has frequently taken him to Ethiopia. He was nominated one of the "50 most influential Torontonians" in 2023.

Early life Maskalyk was born in Alberta to parents who owned an lumber-planing business just outside of Edmonton. While studying, he did a medical elective in Santiago, studying cardiology and health system.

In 2004, Maskalyk qualified as an emergency specialist from the University of Toronto. He has been praised for highlighting the issue of drug interactions with grapefruit consumption, and encouraging awareness of global health at all levels of university education.

Maskalyk has worked for Médecins sans Frontières in Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya, Abyei, Sudan. He has also worked in Black Lion Hospital, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and is the strategic director of Toronto-Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration in Emergency Medicine, an institutional partnership designed to create the first system of emergency medicine in Addis Ababa. He has also worked in Cambodia and Bolivia.

Maskalyk was a founding editor of then open-source, open-access, medical journal Open Medicine. He has spent has career looking at a systems approach to global equity in healthcare, and minimizing conflict of interest in researcher's contracts with industry. In 2022-2023, he took a turn as the executive editor in chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

His writing on global issues has appeared in The Washington Post, and The Globe and Mail where he wrote a diary describing the early days of the COVID19 pandemic in Canada. He has collaborated with Turtle Lodge to address inequities in healthcare experienced by Canada's indigenous people.

Maskalyk hosts regular public events on Facebook, where he leads meditation sessions and conversations about a wide rage of topics including sex, alcohol, kindness, existentialism, exercise, economics, computer modelling, and death. Treating illness, disease and trauma from vehicle collisions and violence, Maskalyk is overwhelmed by heat, exhaustion, and his own emotional struggles facing an overwhelming gap between healthcare needs and the capacity his colleagues can offer.

Life on the Ground Floor

In 2017, Maskalyk released his second autobiographical memoir Life on the Ground Floor, in which he shares stories about his work in emergency departments in Canada, Ethiopia, Cambodia and Bolivia. The book has 26 chapters, A through Z, each an unusual perspective of working in an emergency department. Life on the Ground Floor won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust for Nonfiction award, Canada's largest non-fiction award, in 2017 and has been translated into many languages.

Doctor, Heal Thyself Maskalyk has been working on his third book Doctor, Heal Thyself, writing about western, Traditional Chinese and Indigenous medicine.

Personal life He has a younger brother, Dan.