Background
Dr. Pamela A. Lipsett is the Warfield M. Firor Endowed Professor in Surgery and the first female professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Her areas of clinical expertise include critical care and surgical critical care.
Dr. Lipsett has served as director of general surgery since 2005 and since 2003, as a professor of surgery and nursing and an assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine. She is co-director of the surgical intensive care units and director of the Surgical Critical Care Fellowship Program.
She also serves as a managing board member of the Institute for Excellence in Education and chairs the School of Medicine’s Student Assessment and Program Evaluation Committee.
Dr. Lipsett’s scientific interests include Phase II and III trials of agents for critically ill patients, particularly sepsis; prevention and management of nosocomial infection; the perioperative management of critically ill surgical patients; antibiotic management; hand hygiene; outcomes; cost effectiveness; and quality of life in the critically ill. In addition, her educational research has focused on assessment and program evaluation.
As an intensivist for nearly three decades, Dr. Lipsett has played a key role in a number of clinical trials, government-supported grants and investigator-initiated studies.
She has published more than 140 peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals as well as nearly 40 book chapters and 125 abstracts. She has also served as a lecturer, provided clinical and continuing medical education instruction and mentored many undergraduate students, research and postdoctoral fellows, residents, medical students and nurses.
Dr. Lipsett earned her medical degree from the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She completed a general surgery residency at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, served as assistant chief of service for the Department of Surgery and received the Faculty Advanced Training Specialty Certificate in gastrointestinal surgery. She served as a staff surgeon at Bayview Medical Center for nine years.
Dr. Lipsett also holds an M.H.P.E. in medical education from the University of Illinois, where her thesis (“Generalizability Theory and Qualitative Analysis to Reduce Variance in Multisource Feedback to Residents”) was awarded the Best Thesis of 2010. She holds a B.A. from Regis College.
Her many professional honors include the 2012 Women in Science Award from the American Medical Women's Association, the Johns Hopkins Professor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and — in both 1994 and 1999 — the School of Medicine’s George J. Stuart Award for Outstanding Clinical Teaching.
Dr. Lipsett has served as president of both the Society of Critical Care Medicine and the Surgical Infection Society. A Fellow of American College of Critical Care Medicine and the Association for Women Surgeons, she is a member of professional organizations that include the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma.