10/21/2022
Dr. Haytham Kaafarani (BS Chemistry ’99, MD ’03), a leading surgeon-scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, is the recipient of the Academic Achievement Award and the Outstanding Service Award for 2022 by the American University of Beirut's Surgical Alumni Association of North America (AUB-SAANA). He was honored at the association's annual reception on October 18, 2022, during the American College of Surgeons' Clinical Congress in San Diego, California.
With these awards, which recognize Kaafarani’s excellence in surgery, clinical research, and public health, SAAANA celebrates his instrumental role in the careers of countless medical graduates around the world and his unparalleled dedication to improving surgical quality and patient safety in the US and abroad.
“These two honors are extremely dear to my heart,” says Kaafarani in a Twitter video, “and I am humbled by the simple idea of who had received these awards before and who among you are probably as deserving if not more deserving of these awards.”
The AUB-SAANA awards come mere months after Kaafarani’s appointment as the Joint Commission’s chief patient safety officer and medical director. On that occasion, AUB President Fadlo R. Khuri lauded Kaafarani for his “stewardship of careers of young trauma and general surgeons, AUB graduates and otherwise,” in the President’s Perspective.
The former chair of the Advisory Board of the Worldwide Alumni Association of the American University of Beirut (WAAAUB), Kaafarani is a leader in his field with over 350 published peer-reviewed manuscripts and textbook chapters, a large research team that uses health research methodologies to advance the quality and safety of surgery, and an associate professorship at Harvard Medical School. “All of us at our alma mater are enormously proud of Haytham for his extraordinary success,” commented Associate Vice President for Alumni Relations-North America and General Secretary of WAAAUB Lina Jazi. “I am also grateful to Haytham for his dedicated service as a member of the WAAAUB Advisory Board.”