Waddah B. Al-refaie MD, FACS

Waddah B. Al-Refaie, MD, FACS, is chair of the Department of Surgery at Creighton University School of Medicine Omaha campus. will oversee and direct the clinical, research, education, academic, and innovative missions of general surgery, colorectal, trauma/acute care surgery, cardiovascular, and thoracic surgery at Creighton and CHI Health.

He is a fellowship-trained surgical oncologist with over 15 years of expertise in gastric cancer, skin cancer, and soft tissue sarcomas. He obtained his medical degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. After finishing an internship at Al-Amiri Hospital in Kuwait, he completed his residency at the University of California San Diego. He then completed a surgical oncology fellowship at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Prior to Georgetown, Al-Refaie served as the co-director of the University of Minnesota Surgical Outcomes Research Center.

He has over 130 peer-reviewed publications, books, and book chapters covering various aspects of surgical oncology including variations and disparities in surgical care, and has earned numerous honors and awards for his work. He is an invited speaker on gastric cancer, soft tissue sarcomas and advanced cutaneous cancers. Al-Refaie has contributed to establishing cancer surgery standards for gastric cancer, GI cancer, and soft tissue sarcomas as part of the American College of Surgery Cancer initiatives.

Al-Refaie is a member of several prestigious surgical and cancer societies, including the American College of Surgeons, Society of University Surgeons, Surgical Biology Club, American Society of Clinical Oncology, the Southern Surgical Association, and the American Surgical Association, just to name a few. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Surgical Research and an Editor for the Annals of Surgical Oncology.