President
Lewis J. Kaplan, MD, FACS, FCCP, FCCM
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Lewis J. Kaplan, MD, FACS, FCCP, FCCM, has been actively involved in the Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM) for more than 20 years, serving in a wide variety of roles and leading a host of initiatives, including the ICU Heroes Award, which helped establish a public face for critical care. Dr. Kaplan is a general, trauma, and critical care surgeon at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the Division of Trauma, Surgical Critical Care, and Emergency Surgery and also serves as the section chief of surgical critical care at the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center.
Dr. Kaplan is a Philadelphia native. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology with honors from Franklin and Marshall College and his doctor of medicine degree from Rutgers Medical School. He completed his surgical residency at the Medical College of Pennsylvania (MCP), spending two years in basic research on cardiac bioenergetics and ischemic preconditioning. Dr. Kaplan completed a fellowship in surgical critical care at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and then joined the faculty at MCP and Hahnemann University, where he directed the surgical ICU and surgical critical care (SCC) fellowships. Seven years later he was recruited to Yale University to establish an emergency general surgery service for the Division of Trauma and Surgical Critical Care. He then resumed leadership in the Yale-New Haven Hospital ICU and the SCC and acute care surgery fellowships. During that time, he also established tactical emergency medical services for a local and then regional SWAT team, South Central SWAT, including deploying in the field with the team. Eleven years after moving to New Haven, he was recruited back to Philadelphia into his current roles.
His patient care centers around critical care as well as injury, emergency, and elective general surgery. Research interests have blossomed to include acid-base physiology, mechanical ventilation, and surgical infection. His CV contains nearly 300 publications and hundreds of presentations. Dr. Kaplan sits on the editorial boards of major journals including
Critical Care Medicine,
Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, and
Surgical Infections.
Dr. Kaplan begins his presidential year at the 2020 Critical Care Congress in Orlando, Florida, USA.