Thomas Tsai, MD, MPH, Selected by the White House to Serve as Senior Policy Advisor for the COVID-19 Response

Dr. Tsai will help coordinate the national testing and treatment response in a collaborative effort across federal agencies. One important effort will be the continued expansion of the Test to Treat initiative, a national system of sites where people can receive COVID-19 testing and, if they are positive and treatments are appropriate, immediately obtain a prescription for an oral antiviral medication. Dr. Tsai will be taking a sabbatical to serve in his new role at the White House.

Thomas Tsai, MD, MPH
Director, Clinical Care Redesign, Department of Surgery
Assistant Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Tsai’s clinical interests include the surgical and endoscopic management of gastroesophageal reflux disease, bariatric surgery and complex abdominal wall reconstruction. His current research uses Medicare claims and other large national datasets to study the effectiveness and unintended consequences of health policy interventions on the affordability, accessibility and quality of health care in the United States.

In addition to his work as a minimally invasive bariatric surgeon, Dr. Tsai serves as director of Clinical Care Redesign in the Department of Surgery, where he leads a Surgical Care Redesign Lab with a focus on innovating, testing and scaling value-based care models for surgical patients. He is also an associate faculty member of the Center for Surgery and Public Health and Ariadne Labs. Additionally, he is an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Tsai is a graduate of Harvard College, received his medical degree from Stanford University School of Medicine and completed an MPH at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He completed a residency in general surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, followed by a fellowship in minimally invasive bariatric and advanced GI surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Geoffrey Anderson, MD, MPH, Named General Surgery Residency Associate Program Director for Resident Research Development

GEOFFREY ANDERSON, MD, MPH
Associate Surgeon, Division of Trauma, Burn and Surgical Critical Care
Associate Program Director, General Surgery Residency, Resident Research Development
Assistant Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Anderson graduated from Duke University with a BS in biology and religion. He obtained an MPH at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and his medical degree from the Emory University School of Medicine. He completed a general surgery residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and a trauma and critical care fellowship at the University of Southern California Medical Center.

Dr. Anderson is board certified in general surgery and surgical critical care. He previously served in the Air Force as a flight surgeon and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, where his main role was to evacuate casualties from the battlefield on rotary and fixed wing aircraft. He also assisted in the ER and OR during numerous mass casualty events and assisted with the H1N1 outbreak in Afghanistan.

Dr. Anderson’s clinical and research interests include global surgery, the social determinants of traumatic diseases, implementation science and surgical education.

Faculty Spotlight – Sayeed K. Malek, MD

Sayeed Malek, MD, is the clinical director of Transplant Surgery at the Brigham. He is most proud of his work with living kidney donors. He says many of the donors are not family members but good Samaritans who want to help someone in need. Dr. Malek finds that working with these living donors is one of the most fulfilling aspects of his job as a surgeon. When asked what some of the challenges and positive aspects of being in such a small division are he says, “taking call with only two surgeons is very challenging, but on the other hand the division is very team-oriented.” The transplant team includes transplant coordinators, social workers, financial coordinators, administrators, preop and postop staff, medicine faculty, surgeons and more. There is constant teamwork and sometimes even cross-collaboration with other transplant divisions in the Boston hospitals. Dr. Malek wishes younger surgeons who are considering a career in transplant surgery realize that even though it is a very rigorous career path, it is equally, if not more, rewarding and immensely gratifying to give people a chance to live longer healthier lives. In his free time, Dr. Malek enjoys playing golf.

Please join us in thanking Dr. Malek for all his great contributions to our department and patients!