Suken A. Shah, MD

Biography

Suken A. Shah, MD, is Chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, the Shands/MacEwen Endowed Chair of Orthopaedics, Division Chief of the Spine and Scoliosis Center and Clinical Fellowship Director Emeritus at Nemours Children's Hospital, Delaware. He serves as Professor of Orthopedic Surgery and Pediatrics at Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University. Dr. Shah is certified by the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery. He is a pediatric orthopaedic surgeon whose clinical interests include adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, early onset scoliosis, complex spinal deformities, kyphosis, spondylolisthesis and other problems of the spine, minimally invasive techniques for surgery, osteogenesis imperfecta, and cerebral palsy. He is an innovator, researcher, and key opinion leader in the field of spinal deformity surgery and performs advanced deformity correction techniques, such as vertebral column resection (VCR) and vertebral body tethering (VBT). He trains residents, fellows and visiting observers in these techniques. He is frequently invited to teach and lecture at national and international courses, educational symposia and other institutions. He has been asked to give Grand Rounds and/or visiting lectureships at over 45 universities or institutions and has served as faculty or chair of 75 conferences. He is a prolific writer of more than 250 research publications in peer-reviewed journals, 40 book chapters, was a section editor of Orthopaedic Knowledge Update – 9 and Neuromuscular Scoliosis, two specialty supplements in the Journal of Pediatric Orthopaedics and Seminars in Spine Surgery, and co-edited a textbook, The Management of Disorders of the Child's Cervical Spine. He also serves as a reviewer for five medical journals. As a testament to his academic contributions and body of work, he has 9500 citations, h index of 55 (https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=6S_d2_gAAAAJ&hl=en), and is ranked in the top 8 of experts on scoliosis (0.033%) worldwide by Expertscape (https://expertscape.com/ex/scoliosis). He has received the Russell A Hibbs award (twice), the Louis A Goldstein award, and the Thomas Whitecloud award, all for excellence in spine and scoliosis research. Distinctions also include the Scoliosis Research Society Traveling Fellowship, AAOS Leadership Fellows Program (LFP) and the prestigious American British Canadian (ABC) Traveling Fellowship in 2015 from the American Orthopaedic Association. In 2014, he was named one of the Top 17 Pediatric Orthopedic Surgeons in the United States by Orthopedics This Week and continues to garner mentions in Best Doctors in America (2007-2022), Philadelphia Magazine and Delaware Today. He has completed the course on Leadership Development for Physicians in Academic Health Centers at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Shah is an active member of international specialty societies and served on the Board of Directors of the Scoliosis Research Society (SRS) as the Education Council chair and previously chaired the Education Committee, Program Committee, Growing Spine Committee and Safety & Value Committee. He was recently elected as Vice President of the SRS. He is a member of the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America (POSNA) and chaired the Industry Relations Committee, One-Day Course Committee and is Director of the International Pediatric Orthopaedic Symposium (IPOS), an annual comprehensive, interactive hands-on course taught by internationally renowned faculty. In addition to membership in multiple research study groups, he is President of the Setting Scoliosis Straight Foundation and Chair of the Executive Committee of the Harms Study Group, a group dedicated to supporting discoveries in scoliosis.