T Forcht Dagi, MD, DMedSc, DHC, MBA, FRCSEd, FAANS, FACS, FCCM is a neurosurgeon and neuro-intensivist, a veteran venture capitalist and board director with extensive international experience in public service. He has helped raise over $700 million in funds for portfolio companies and venture capital funds and has more than 15 years of successful experience in founding, managing and exiting companies in health care services and in the life sciences. He has operating experience in healthcare services, healthcare information technology and the biomedical sector, and he has served on boards of directors of publicly traded and privately held companies including. His portfolio has included AtheroGenics, Inc (Nasdaq: AGIX); Inhibitex, Inc. (Nasdaq: INHX, acquired by Bristol-Myers-Squibb); Synageva, Inc. (acquired by Alexion); Trivirix, Inc. (acquired by Nortel); Encelle, Inc. (acquired by Pioneer Surgical); Teladoc (NYSE: TDOC); and Merix Biosciences (now Argos Therapeutics, Nasdaq: ARGS). He has also chaired or served on the scientific advisory boards of Dupont Pharma, Lundbeck, the Royal Bank of Canada and other private and publicly listed companies.
Dr. Dagi serves as an Honourary Professor at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland (UK), and a Scholar in the Academy at Harvard Medical School. He is past chair of the International Advisory Panel of the Queen’s School of Medicine. He is immediate past chair, and a Director of the Committee on Perioperative Care of the American College of Surgery the Council for Surgical and Perioperative Safety and the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation. He has lectured in the Harvard Business School on healthcare innovation and in the Biomedical Entrepreneurship Program at the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. He is Director of Life Sciences at Anglo Scientific at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
Dr. Dagi received an AB from Columbia University, his MD and MPH degrees from Johns Hopkins, and an MBA from the Wharton School. He was named the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Fellow at Harvard, from which he also received a MTS (jurisprudence). He trained at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Neurosurgical Unit of the Guy’s, Maudsley and King’s College Hospitals in London, and was a Mendeleyeff Travelling Fellow and a Neuroresearch Foundation Fellow. He worked at the MGH Limbic Diencephalic Laboratory on neuromodulation, and at the NIH on PET scanning under Dr. Louis Sokoloff in the Laboratory for Cerebral Metabolism. He was appointed to the Reserve Council of the United States, and served as a neurosurgeon at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, combat neurosurgeon and flight surgeon, and faculty in the John Fitzgerald Kennedy School for Special Warfare and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the American College of Surgeons, for which he serves as a spokesman, and, by election, to the College of Critical Care Medicine, reserved for the highest 5% of practitioners in the field.
Dr. Dagi was President of the Georgia Neurosurgical Society, Director of the Georgia Biomedical Association, Founding Director of the Southeast Life Sciences Investor Association, Director of the Medical Development Group in Massachusetts and a Director of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. He serves as an overseer of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and sits on the Research Oversight Committee. Among other distinctions, he has been awarded the US Humanitarian Service Medal, and a DMedSc from Queen’s University Belfast, and a DHC from the Kaunas Technical University in Lithuania for contributions to medicine and public service. He was named the Sir Thomas and Edith Dixon Medalist for 2012 and was named to an ad hominem Fellowship in the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh in 2013. In 2015 he was the Distinguished Lecturer in the Space 4 Biomedicine Program of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) and the Baylor College of Medicine Center for Space Medicine. In 2016 he was named to the advisory board of CURAM, the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research in Medical Devices in Galway, Ireland. He is an editor of Neurosurgery, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and Numanities, and has authored or co-authored over 175 articles and authored or edited several books.