Hashem El-Serag is a Palestinian-American doctor and medical researcher best known for his research in liver cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and the hepatitis C virus.

 

El-Serag was born in 1966 in Libya to Palestinian parents from the Gaza Strip. He received his M.D. from Al-Arab Medical University in Benghazi, Libya. He then moved to the United States, where he performed his residency in internal medicine at Yale University Greenwich Hospital (Connecticut) and received a gastroenterology fellowship at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, before earning his Master of Public Health from the University of New Mexico.

 

Most of the research on Hepatocellular carcinoma in the United States can be attributed to El-Serag, who has published over 250 scholarly papers on the subject, and received the GlaxoWellcome Digestive Health Foundation Award for Health Care Advancement in 1997, the American Gastroenterological Association's Young Clinical Investigator Award in 2003, and the American Gastroenterological Association's Masters Award in Clinical Research in 2005 for his work. In 2007, Dr. El-Serag was selected as a member of American Society for Clinical Investigator (ASCI). Dr. El-Serag has also become a leading expert on chronic liver disease, and gastroesophageal reflux disease.

n 2007, he became the Chief of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Baylor College of Medicine. He also serves as Leader, Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences Program, Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center, and the Chief of Clinical Epidemiology and Outcomes Division at Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center Houston, Texas. He is funded by multiple research grants National Institutes of Health, VA and professional societies. Dr. El-Serag has more than 250 published articles. Several of his studies were published in notable journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Archives of Internal Medicine, Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and GUT. The seminal work on HCC, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Rising Incidence of Hepatocellular Carcinoma in the United States, has been cited approximately 2250 times. In addition, he was the Associate Editor of Gastroenterology, the leading specialty journal and in 2012, Editor-in-Chief of Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.