Michael M. Abecassis

Dr. Abecassis is a renowned transplantation surgeon at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who has demonstrated outstanding leadership qualities in academia, in the clinic and throughout his career in medicine – a career that spans over 30 years. Dr. Abecassis is the Director of the Comprehensive Transplant Center of the Feinberg School of Medicine. He is also the Chief of Transplant Surgery in the Department of Surgery at Feinberg and a James Roscoe Miller Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Feinberg.

Dr. Abecassis received his MD degree from the University of Toronto in 1983 and was awarded an MBA degree from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2000. After his postgraduate tenure in Toronto, Dr. Abecassis began his clinical career as Assistant Professor of Surgery and Director of Liver Transplantation and Hepatobiliary Surgery at the University of Iowa. Dr. Abecassis was recruited by Northwestern University in 1993 to become its Director of Liver Transplantation. There he initiated Northwestern’s liver transplant program. In 2004, Dr. Abecassis was named Chief of the Division of Transplantation at the Feinberg School of Medicine. He became Founding Director of the Comprehensive Transplant Center at Northwestern in 2009 and was appointed Dean for Clinical Affairs at the Feinberg School of Medicine in 2008, serving until 2011.

Dr. Abecassis has received continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the past 15 years. He is the principal investigator in research that includes both laboratory and clinical studies. He is also the principal investigator of the clinical core of the NIH Genomics of Transplantation Cooperative Research Program. Dr. Abecassis has trained numerous clinical and research fellows.

Dr. Abecassis is a member of many national and international professional societies, including the Society of University Surgeons and the American Surgical Association and was President of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons 2010-2011. He has served and continues to serve on the Editorial Boards of major scientific journals (Hepatology, Surgery, Transplantation and Liver Transplantation) and is a reviewer for all major journals related to surgery and transplantation. He has served as a member of NIH grant study sections and special emphasis panels relating to both transplantation and virology. He is a permanent member of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) study section for career development and training grants.

Dr. Abecassis has been a course director for the American Society of Transplant Surgeons Leadership Development Program since 2010 and was course director for the Advanced Leader Development Program in 2013 at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. He was a voting member of the Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee and served on the United HealthCare Group Physician Advisory Board on Healthcare Performance and Quality. Dr. Abecassis has been a member of various local, regional and national regulatory committees and has published seminal papers on both the regulatory and financial aspects of transplantation, including the Healthcare Reform and the Affordable Care Act.