UCSF Chancellor Debas to present Schilling surgery lecture

Haile Debas

A former UW professor of surgery who is now chancellor and dean at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine will give the fourth annual Helen and John Schilling Lecture for the Department of Surgery.

Dr. Haile T. Debas will speak on "Insights into the Molecular Origin and Function of the Pancreas" at
2:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 6, in Hogness Auditorium of the Health Sciences Center. The lecture is free and open to everyone.

Debas was at the UW from 1985 to 1987, when he was recruited to UCSF as chair of the Department of Surgery. He was named dean of the School of Medicine in 1993 and became chancellor for the campus in 1997. He assumed the chancellorship to provide strong and experienced campus leadership, especially for completion of the merger of UCSF and Stanford clinical services and planning for a second campus.

Debas is widely recognized as a leading expert on the gastrointestinal system and has made several contributions to understanding the physiology, biochemistry and pathophysiology of gastrointestinal peptide hormones. He has received continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health for the past 15 years.

Under his leadership, the UCSF Department of Surgery attained unprecedented national recognition and is considered one of the best academic surgery departments in the nation. In 1993, Dr. Carlos Pellegrini, current chair of the UW Department of Surgery, was recruited from UCSF.

Debas was worn in Asmara, Eritrea, then part of Ethiopia. Following college in Addis Ababa, he earned an M.D. degree from McGill University in Montreal. He interned at the Ottawa Civic Hospital and completed his residency at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His postgraduate training included a year as a research fellow at the University of Glasgow/Western Infirmary in Scotland and two years at the University of California, Los Angeles as a Medical Research Council Scholar in gastrointestinal physiology.

His plan to return to Eritrea after training was thwarted by civil war in Ethiopia and he spend a year in private practice in the Yukon Territories of Canada. He then joined the surgery faculty at the University of British Columbia and remained there from 1970 to 1980. He joined the UW after a faculty appointment at UCLA in the early '80s.

Debas is a member of the Institute of Medicine, a director of the American Board of Surgery, and a past president of the International Hepato-Biliary-Pancreatic Association and the Association for Academic Minority Physicians. He is one of only a few surgeons to be elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In the UCSF School of Medicine, Debas has rededicated the school to the importance of teaching medical students and has supported establishment of several interdepartmental and interdisciplinary centers.

The lecture is named for Dr. John Schilling, professor emeritus of surgery who was chair of the department from 1975 to 1983, and his wife Helen. ¶