Dr. Raheem Kherani is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinician Investigator at Arthritis Research Canada. He currently practices as a rheumatologist at West Coast Rheumatology Associates, the GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre and Vancouver General Hospital, and serves as the Division Head of Rheumatology in the Department of Medicine at Richmond Hospital.

He completed his Pharmacy and Medicine degrees at the University of Alberta with residency training at the University of Toronto, McMaster University and the University of British Columbia. Dr. Kherani went on to obtain a Masters in Health Professions Education degree at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Dr. Kherani is past Program Director of Adult Rheumatology at UBC, past Chair of the Canadian Rheumatology Association Education Committee, and a past member of the Royal College Specialty Committee in Rheumatology.  He is the current Chair of the BC Coalition of Osteoporosis Physicians. He has assisted in the development of osteoporosis and Sjögren’s disease initiatives in British Columbia, including clinical trials, fracture liaison services and collaborative clinics. He is the Medical Lead for the Intensive Collaborative Arthritis Program at the Mary Pack Arthritis Centre.

Dr. Carrie Ye is an Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. She has a rheumatology practice focused on osteoporosis and rheumatic toxicities of cancer immunotherapy. She is the Medical Director of the Northern Alberta Osteoporosis Program and the Clinical Lead of the Canadian Research Group of Rheumatology in Immuno-Oncology (CanRIO). She completed medical school and rheumatology training at the University of Alberta, and a Master’s degree in Public Health, clinical epidemiology, at Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Ye completed her rheumatology training in 2016 and began her career as a clinician-educator, serving a five-year term as Program Director of the University of Alberta Rheumatology Training Program. As a clinician, she encountered numerous gaps in the literature, which fueled her passion for conducting clinical studies to address these unmet needs. Over time, she transitioned to a clinician-researcher and was appointed to her first academic position as an Assistant Professor in July 2021. She earned her Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, focusing on epidemiology. Her advanced training in statistics led her to further studies in machine learning, which she has since applied to a range of projects using artificial intelligence to enhance patient care.

Dr. Ye has a clinical interest in osteoporosis and established the Multidisciplinary Bone Health Clinic at the University of Alberta Hospital in 2016. This clinic has since evolved into the Northern Alberta Osteoporosis Program (NAOP), now comprising a team of five physician specialists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, dietitians, pharmacists, and administrative staff. NAOP encompasses a clinical service, a research database and program, a resident training rotation in osteoporosis, and a patient education initiative. Under the mentorship of Dr. William D. Leslie, she has used administrative health data to assess fracture risk in various populations.

Her clinical and research work on osteoporosis and fracture risk in cancer patients led to close collaborations with oncologists, coinciding with the adoption of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) as a standard of care. These collaborations sparked her interest in rheumatic toxicities associated with ICIs. In 2019, she co-founded CanRIO (the Canadian Research Group of Rheumatology in Immuno-Oncology) with rheumatologists across Canada and was elected the Clinical Sciences Lead of its Scientific Advisory Committee. Building on her experience with the NAOP database, she developed two national CanRIO databases: the CanRIO Prospective Database (which includes clinical and biobanking data) and the CanRIO Retrospective Database (clinical data only). These databases have been instrumental in addressing key questions in this emerging area of rheumatology.

She led the development of the Canadian Rheumatology Association (CRA)/CanRIO GRADE Consensus Guidelines for managing pre-existing autoimmune disease during ICI therapy. With support from the Alberta Cancer Foundation, she leads the first placebo-controlled trials for treating ICI-associated inflammatory arthritis (IMPACT 2.0 and IMPACT 2.1). In 2020, she and Dr. Janet Roberts received a CIORA grant to develop an online knowledge translation platform for healthcare providers managing patients with rheumatic immune-related adverse events (Rh-irAEs): CanRIO.ca. This website is now used by rheumatologists and oncologists internationally and was awarded the CRA Practice Reflection Gold Medal in 2023. She has also received CIHR funding to investigate ICI-associated rheumatic toxicities using administrative health data and was selected for the esteemed CIHR Early Career Researcher in Cancer Award in 2025.

She collaborates closely with computer scientists and engineers to apply artificial intelligence to the evaluation and management of bone and joint diseases. These projects include computer vision models for opportunistic bone mineral density estimation from clinical CT scans, automated interpretation of musculoskeletal ultrasound, and detection of hand joint effusions using standard photographs and videos. Through funding from The Arthritis Society Canada, she is developing and deploying a large language model (LLM) to automate triage in rheumatology. She has also received CIHR funding to create a source-verified, rheumatology-specific LLM chatbot (“ChatRheum”) aimed at improving the safety and reliability of medical information provided to patients through AI tools.

The overarching goal of her research program is to use data-driven solutions to improve care for patients with bone and joint diseases.