Awards

Titled Professor (2022)

Jay L. Grosfeld Professor of Surgery

About Karl Y. Bilimoria

Dr. Karl Y. Bilimoria earned his B.A. from Northwestern University in 1998. He went on to complete his M.D. at Indiana University (IU) in 2003. Later, he returned to Northwestern University to earn his M.S.

Bilimoria is a surgical oncologist, researcher, and physician executive at IU. He is the chair of the Department of Surgery and the Jay Grosfeld Professor of Surgery. He is also the Vice President for Surgical Quality for the IU Health system. His clinical practice is focused on melanoma and sarcoma. Bilimoria is a health services, quality improvement, health policy, and medical education researcher. He is the Executive Director of the Surgical Outcomes and Quality Improvement Center (SOQIC) at Indiana University, a nationally recognized research team focused on national, regional, and local quality improvement research and implementation, as well as surgical education. Bilimoria founded the 56-hospital Illinois Surgical Quality Improvement Collaborative (ISQIC), soon to be merged with Indiana hospitals. He also developed a novel platform for innovative surgical education trials as the Principal Investigator of the 151-hospital FIRST Trial and the co-PI of the subsequent 215-hospital SECOND Trial. He is a Faculty Scholar at the American College of Surgeons.

Billimoria has published more than 450 scientific articles, including numerous publications in JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine (h-index=71). Bilimoria’s research is funded by the NIH, AHRQ, and numerous others totaling >$35M. He is a past president of the Association for Academic Surgery and the Surgical Outcomes Club. He was awarded Mentor of the Year by Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine in 2020 and has been listed by Becker’s as one of the “Top 50 Experts Leading the Field of Patient Safety” in the U.S. Bilimoria previously had a variety of executive leadership roles for the Northwestern Medicine 11-hospital health system.