Mark G. Shrime, MD, MPH, PhD, FACS, is the founder and Director of the Center for Global Surgery Evaluation at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, an Assistant Professor of Otolaryngology and of Global Health and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Health and Wellbeing.
He is the author of seminal papers on the global burden of surgical disease, the financial burden facing surgical patients, and the number of people who cannot access safe surgery worldwide. He served as a co-author on the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery.
Dr. Shrime graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1996 with a BA in molecular biology. He received his MD from the University of Texas in 2001, after taking a year to teach organic chemistry in Singapore. Medical school was followed by a residency in otolaryngology at the joint Columbia/Cornell program in Manhattan, followed, in turn, by a fellowship in head and neck surgical oncology at the University of Toronto in 2007. He completed a second fellowship in microvascular reconstructive surgery, also at the University of Toronto, in 2008. He was the first to identify a novel independent prognostic indicator in head and neck cancer.
To date, he has worked and taught in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Benin, Togo, Congo, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, Cameroon, and Madagascar. In May, 2011, he graduated with an MPH in global health from the Harvard School of Public Health, where he was a finalist for both the Albert Schweitzer award and the HSPH Student Recognition award, and in May, 2015, he received his PhD in health policy from Harvard University, with a concentration in decision science. His research is supported by the Damon Runyon Cancer Foundation and Mercy Ships; he has previously received research support from the GE Foundation’s Safe Surgery 2020 project and the Steven C. and Carmella Kletjian Foundation.
His academic pursuits focus on surgical delivery in low- and middle-income countries, where he has a specific interest in the intersection of health and impoverishment. His work aims to determine optimal policies and platforms for surgical delivery that maximize health benefits while simultaneously minimizing the risk of financial catastrophe faced by patients. In 2018, he was awarded the Arnold P. Gold Humanism in Medicine Award by the American Academy of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery.
When not working, he is an avid photographer and rock climber, and has competed on Seasons 8 and 9 of American Ninja Warrior.