Prior to this, Dr. El Emam was a Senior Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada and he headed up the Quantitative Methods Group at the Fraunhofer Institute in Kaiserslautern, Germany. His main area of research is data sharing and the privacy of personal health information, which includes developing techniques for secure anonymization of health information, assessing re-identification risk of health datasets and developing secure multi-party computation protocols for distributed surveillance and data analysis.