Dr. Islam named MCG chief of pulmonary/critical care medicine

AUGUSTA, Ga. – Dr. Shaheen Islam, director of Interventional Pulmonology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, has been named chief of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia.

Islam, a national leader in interventional pulmonology and an expert in lung cancer and critical care who also directs Ohio State’s Interventional Pulmonology Fellowship Program, joins the MCG faculty July 1.

“We are excited to welcome Dr. Islam, an established and avid clinician, educator, investigator and leader to the Department of Medicine and to MCG,” said Dr. Michael Madaio, department chair and Virgil P. Sydenstricker, MD, Chair. “His extensive accomplishments include developing and managing a large, multidisciplinary, individualized lung- cancer screening program that has helped hundreds of patients; developing full-service interventional pulmonology and critical-care procedures programs; as well as a training program for introducing common procedures to pulmonary fellows throughout the Midwest.”

Longtime pulmonology leader, Dr. W. Bruce Davis, who also was recruited to MCG as section chief from Ohio State in 1992, will continue to serve on the faculty part-time.

“We thank Dr. Davis for more than 25 years of exceptional leadership at MCG and in his field,” Madaio said.

Islam chairs the Bronchoscopy Procedure Accreditation Committee of the American Association of Bronchology and Interventional Pulmonology and is a member of the association’s Board of Directors and Interventional Pulmonology Board Certification Examination Development Committee. He co-chairs the Education Committee of the Association of Interventional Pulmonology Program Directors. He is on the Board of Regents of the World Association of Bronchology and is a member of the association’s Membership Committee. He also serves on the Global Tracheostomy Collaboration Database Committee and the Interventional/Chest Diagnostics Procedure Network of the American College of Chest Physicians.

Islam is academic editor of the journal Medicine and an editorial board member of the journals Clinical Research in Pulmonology, Austin Journal of Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine and Pleura.

The new MCG chief has been a faculty member at Ohio State since 2005. His responsibilities there have also included medical director of the James Lung Cancer Screening Program at Ohio State’s Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and associate medical director of the Pulmonary Diagnostics Lab.

He served as a research, academic and/or clinical mentor to nearly 20 fellows, medical students and residents from 2006-17.

Islam is a 1988 graduate of Sir Salimullah Medical College at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. He completed an internal medicine residency at McLaren Regional Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Michigan State University, and a pulmonary and critical care medicine fellowship – including a year as chief fellow – at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts. He completed an additional year of fellowship training in interventional pulmonology at the Lahey Clinic, and further procedural training in Germany and France. He has a master of public health degree with concentrations in epidemiology and biostatistics from Boston University and is triple boarded in pulmonary, critical care and interventional pulmonology.