Bio
Dr. Thomas Weiser is a general, emergency, and trauma surgeon, and surgical intensivist. He treats and cares for injured patients and those with acute surgical emergencies as well as manages critically ill surgical patients in the Intensive Care Unit.
His research has focused on evaluating the role surgical care plays in the delivery of health services in resource poor settings, in particular low and middle income countries. He is interested in barriers to access and provision of surgical care, the quality of surgical services, and outcomes research as well as the science of implementation, how improvements can be made, and how to strengthen compliance with best practices and change behaviors for the better. He also has an interest in domestic policy as it relates to trauma outcomes, trauma systems, insurance coverage and costs of care, and firearm violence.
Dr. Weiser's efforts have led to improvements in the safety and reliability of surgical service, the quality of surgical care delivered globally, and improvements team dynamics, function, and communication. He works closely with Lifebox, a nonprofit focused on improving surgical and anesthetic safety worldwide, where he was previously the Consulting Medical Officer. Lifebox delivers programs throughout the world in combination with local partners and includes the procurement and distribution of low cost devices to improve the safety of care (including pulse oximeters for the routine monitoring of patients undergoing anesthesia and surgical headlights to safeguard care during power outage) and Clean Cut, a surgical infection prevention and control program that has reduced complications by up to 50%. This work safeguards millions of surgical patients every year.
From 2006-2009, he was part of the World Health Organization’s Safe Surgery Saves Lives program where he quantified the global volume of surgery and created, implemented, evaluated, and promoted the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist. He was part of the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery, the World Bank Disease Control Priorities Program, and a Gates Grand Challenge awardee.
From 2022-2026 he was the Program Director of Surgery: Assess/Validate/Expand (SAVE) at Wellcome Leap. His current research efforts aim to accelerate computer vision models for quantifying surgical performance and identifying mechanisms to predict patient recovery trajectories following surgery.
