Dr. Ovie Albert

MB BS, CCFP (AM), MSc, ABPM (Addiction Medicine), ISAM (C)

Affiliations

Assistant Professor

Cumming School of Medicine, Department of Family Medicine

Physician

Alberta Health Services

Contact information

ovie.albert1@ucalgary.ca

Web presence

ORCID

ResearchGate

PubMed

Background

Biography

Ovie Martin Albert, MB BS, CCFP (AM), MSc, ABPM (Addiction Medicine), ISAM (C), is an Addiction Medicine Physician and Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary. He practices clinically with Recovery Alberta's Virtual Opioid Dependency Program (VODP) and the Centennial Centre for Mental Health and Brain Injury, with additional clinical and academic affiliations at the University of Saskatchewan.

His research spans two complementary domains: Canadian addiction medicine — including opioid agonist therapy, opioid use disorder in carceral settings, harm reduction, and health systems — and West African substance use epidemiology and drug policy, with a sustained focus on Nigeria. He has developed original theoretical frameworks including the Informational Dysregulation Framework of Addiction (IDFA) and the Graded Competition Model for buprenorphine-opioid pharmacodynamics, and has contributed early work at the intersection of quantum cognition and addiction medicine.

Dr. Albert holds leadership roles in family medicine education and governance at the national and provincial levels. With the College of Family Physicians of Canada, he is a past Chair of the Hospital Medicine Member Interest Group and served on the Member Interest Groups Section (MIGS) Council, as well as on the planning committee for the Family Medicine Forum, Canada's largest physician conference. Provincially, he currently serves on the Education Committee of the Alberta College of Family Physicians and as a Physician Member-at-Large on the Provincial Application Review Committee under Recovery Alberta. Alongside this service, he maintains an active publication program spanning peer-reviewed journals in addiction medicine, public health, and clinical pharmacology.

Research

Areas of Research

Addiction Medicine, Opioid Use Disorder, and Pain

Clinical and health-services research on opioid use disorder, including opioid agonist therapy, buprenorphine initiation in the fentanyl era, management of acute pain in patients on buprenorphine (graded competition model), and continuity of care in correctional and rural settings.

Drug Epidemiology and Public Health

Canadian drug-related mortality and morbidity, polysubstance use, forensic drug identification data as supply indicators, and harm reduction policy.

Theoretical and Computational Models of Addiction

Information-processing frameworks for understanding addiction and relapse, including the Informational Dysregulation Framework of Addiction (IDFA), computational psychiatry, precision-weighting and active inference, and quantum-cognition approaches to clinical decision-making.

Global Health and Substance Use in West Africa

Substance use epidemiology in Nigeria and West Africa, including tramadol misuse, tobacco use patterns, and treatment access in low-resource settings.