Pioneering life-saving transplants and mentoring the next generation of women surgeons
Age: 38
Job Title: Transplant Surgeion and Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta
Dr. Blaire Anderson is used to standing out in her field. Not only is she Alberta’s first woman hepato-pancreato-biliary surgeon, she’s the first doctor in Western Canada to successfully perform a combined heart-liver transplant. But seeing a woman lead in the medical field is the norm to Dr. Anderson, whose mother was one of the only doctors in her rural community. “So, except during harvest, my dad was a stay-at-home dad,” she says.
Through the only intestinal transplant program at her University of Alberta clinic, Dr. Anderson pioneered transplant oncology in Alberta and Saskatchewan — bringing life-saving options to prairie people whose bile duct cancer and colorectal cancer has spread to their livers.
Her reach stretches beyond life-saving procedures to improving opportunities for other women in her field through her faculty mentorship work with the Association of Women Surgeons. “My dad’s side of the family is all agriculture, and my mom’s side of the family is mostly in medicine and primary care,” she says. “I firmly believe you can’t be what you can’t see.”
Dr. Anderson mostly saw men when she attended medical school. And some even asked her — a former provincial team long-track speed skater, mind you — if she’d be strong enough to hypothetically staple up a post-surgery patient. Early on, she learned that staying authentic to yourself matters more than fitting in. But more than that, she maintains that no team is complete without a mix of perspectives.
Removing the clamps to let a once-dead liver receive new blood and come to colourful life — or better yet, seeing the bile start to flow — will always amaze the soft-spoken surgeon. These days, with a husband who left policing to care for their children, Dr. Anderson says she didn’t fully recognize the uniqueness of her upbringing until her own family echoed it back at her.
This article appears in the November/December 2025 issue of Edify
