George Sheldon, MD, FACS

George Sheldon, MD, FACS, a graduate of the Kansas University School of Medicine, was fellow in internal medicine at the Mayo Clinic, resident in surgery at the University of California-San Francisco, and fellow in surgical biology at Harvard Medical School. He was professor of surgery and chief of the trauma service at the University of California-San Francisco prior to becoming the Zack D. Owens Professor and Chairman (1984-2001) of the department of surgery at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Sheldon is one of fewer than 20 surgeons in the past 100 years to be president of all of the major surgical organizations, including president of the American College of Surgeons (ACS), president of the American Surgical Association, president of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma, and chair of the American Board of Surgery. He is the first surgeon, not a dean, to be chairman of the Association of American Medical Colleges since 1879. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine’s National Academy of Sciences. He was a charter member of the Council on Graduate Medical Education (COGME) when it was founded in 1985 under the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Sheldon holds honorary fellowships in the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, the European Surgical Association, the British Columbia Surgical Association, and the Colombian Surgical Association. He is an honorary fellow of the Society of Black Academic Surgeons. In 2000, he received the Kansas University School of Medicine Distinguished Alumna Award. In 2001, he was recognized by the North Carolina Chapter of ACS as Honored Surgeon, and was awarded the University of North Carolina Medical Alumni Association’s Distinguished Faculty Award. In 2003, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Member by the Association of American Medical Colleges. In 2008, he was honored with a Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Arts and Sciences of The University of Kansas.

Dr. Sheldon currently is a member of the faculty council of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the faculty assembly of the University of North Carolina system. He currently holds the position of editor-in-chief of e-FACS.org, the web portal of the ACS, as well as director of the ACS Health Policy Institute.