Emile Bacha
Roth Salzhauer Professor of Surgery and Chief
Division of Cardiac, Thoracic and Vascular Surgery
Columbia University Medical Center / New York-Presbyterian
Director, Pediatric and Congenital Heart Surgery
Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital
Dr. Emile Bacha is a US board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon with a subspecialization in pediatric
cardiac surgery. Dr. Bacha is a tenured Professor of Surgery at Columbia University and currently the
Chief of the Division of Cardiac, Thoracic, and Vascular Surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia
University Medical Center, and Director of Congenital Heart Surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Morgan
Stanley Children’s Hospital and Komansky-Weill-Cornell Children’s. Prior to that, he was Senior Associate
in Cardiac Surgery at the Children's Hospital Boston and Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard
Medical School.
Dr. Bacha received his medical degree at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. He
completed his surgical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Emory University Hospitals, and
a research fellowship at the Marie-Lannelongue Hospital of Paris-Sud University in France. He completed
a fellowship in cardiothoracic surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1989.
Dr. Bacha's research interests center around rendering pediatric cardiac surgery safer and less invasive.
He has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, American Heart Association,
AATS, and Thoracic Surgery Foundation for Research and Education. Dr. Bacha is one of the early
developers of the "hybrid stage I" procedure for hypoplastic left heart syndrome. He is also the principal
developer of a widely accepted technical competency metric for pediatric heart surgeons.
Dr. Bacha has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He is a past-Associate
Editor of the Journal for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, and a member of the Society of Thoracic
Surgeons (STS), the American Association of Thoracic Surgery (AATS), the Congenital Heart Surgeons'
Society (CHSS), the American College of Cardiologists, and the American College of Surgeons. He
currently serves as the Treasurer for the AATS and as Secretary of the CHSS.