Cleveland (Ohio) Clinic has appointed Ajita Prabhu, MD, as chair of its General Surgery Department, succeeding R. Matthew Walsh, MD, who retired after leading the department for more than a decade.
According to a June 8 news release, Dr. Prabhu joins the role from within the system, where she served as a professor of surgery at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and as program director of the General Surgery Residency Program. She has been on staff at Cleveland Clinic since 2016.
Her national credentials include serving as an examiner for the American Board of Surgery and as one of four national faculty members for the American College of Surgeons Residents as Teachers and Leaders Course. She also serves as an ad hoc editor for JAMA Surgery, the Journal of the American College of Surgeons and the New England Journal of Medicine, and sits on the editorial board of Annals of Surgery.
Miguel Regueiro, MD, executive vice president and enterprise chief of staff, credited Dr. Walsh with building a high-performing department and expressed confidence in Dr. Prabhu’s direction. “We are very excited about Dr. Prabhu’s appointment and the success we believe she will bring to the department,” Dr. Regueiro said.
Dr. Prabhu said her priorities include strengthening departmental collaboration across Cleveland Clinic’s multiple locations, aligning research efforts, and developing a cohesive strategy for integrating robotic surgery and AI into clinical practice — while preserving what she called the irreplaceable human dimension of patient care.
Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit academic medical center headquartered in Cleveland with locations across Ohio, Florida, Nevada, London, Abu Dhabi and Canada.
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