Fizan Abdullah, MD, PhD, FACS, FAAP
Dr. Fizan Abdullah received his M.D. & Ph.D. degrees from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia by 1998. He completed his General Surgery residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital after which he proceeded to the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles for his Pediatric Surgery Fellowship.
Dr. Abdullah joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 2005. Dr. Abdullah’s expertise is in surgery for infants and children with congenital anomalies as well as advanced laparoscopy. He started the infant laparoscopy program at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center soon after his arrival. He performed the first ever laparoscopic procedures in infants at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and in the region including laparoscopic tracheo-esophageal atresia repair, laparoscopic choledochal cyst excision and reconstruction, laparoscopic inguinal hernia repair, laparoscopic pyloromyotomy among others. At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Abdullah served as the Program Director for the Fellowship in Pediatric Surgery and Assistant Program Director for the Residency in General Surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Abdullah also served as an Associate Professor of International Health with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Dr. Abdullah joined Lurie Children’s after spending a decade at Johns Hopkins Medicine as a pediatric surgeon, a physician-scientist and an educator. As an academician, Dr. Abdullah has devoted much of his research to studying systemic predictors that influence the quality and safety of surgical care, affect patient outcomes and have the potential to reduce complications, length of stay and cost of care. More recently, he leads a group of investigators who are studying the benefits of mobile and wearable technologies on pediatric surgical outcomes. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed research articles and his research has been funded in the past by the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization. Dr. Abdullah also has an interest in global health and disparities stemming from access to surgical care. He is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the G4 Alliance, an advocacy organization dedicated to catalyzing systemic changes on a global scale to improve the availability of surgical, obstetric, trauma and anesthesia care in underserved and impoverished areas of the world. He also has served an outside consultant to the World Health Organization and is also had served as the lead investigator for a national Neonatal Quality Improvement initiative performed in collaboration with the World Health Organization and Ghana Health Service.
Dr. Abdullah has also served as the past Chair of the American Pediatric Surgical Association (APSA) Outcomes Committee charged with developing evidence-based standards and practice guidelines. He was appointed to the combined Task Force for Children’s Surgical Care by the American College of Surgeons (ACS) charged with defining and setting system requirements needed for the delivery of safe, reliable and quality surgical care to children across the United States. Dr. Abdullah is a Senior Member and past Director of the American Board of Surgery (ABS), an organization designed to improve the safety of surgical care by assessing the technical qualifications of individual providers and granting board certifications to surgeons. He holds the distinction of being the youngest surgeon ever elected as one of its Directors in the more than 80 year history of the organization. Dr. Abdullah is also a past Director of ABS’ Board of Pediatric Surgery, which grants certifications to U.S. pediatric surgeons.
Dr. Abdullah currently serves as the President of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Medical Association.