Dale W Laird is a Professor at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada and holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Gap Junctions and Disease. He obtained his PhD at the University of British Columbia with Postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology.

He was inducted as a Fellow into the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2016. His research interest encompasses studies related to the function of gap junction channel proteins, connexins, and a related family of proteins, pannexins, in health and disease. He routinely employs tissue-relevant and mutant mouse models to dissect the roles of connexin and pannexin large-pore channels in normal physiology, pathophysiology and cancer.