Washington/United States: Two Indian-origin doctors, Shanu Nikhil Kothari and Tejal S. Brahmbhatt, have been appointed as directors to specialty boards of the American Board of Surgery (ABS). Both will begin their six-year terms in September 2026.
The American Board of Surgery announced on August 18 the appointment of five new directors to its specialty boards. Kothari has been appointed to the General Surgery Board, while Brahmbhatt will serve on the Surgical Critical Care Board.
Shanu Nikhil Kothari
Shanu Nikhil Kothari, M.D., is chair and chief of surgery at Prisma Health in Greenville, South Carolina, and a professor of surgery at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville.
His clinical practice focuses primarily on bariatric and foregut surgery. He earned his medical degree from the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria before completing his general surgery residency at Gundersen Lutheran Medical Foundation in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
He later completed a fellowship in minimally invasive surgery at the Medical College of Virginia.
Kothari's clinical and research interests include bariatric and foregut surgery, along with surgical education and training.
He is also a member of the ABS Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Focused Practice Designation Exam Committee and has served as an examiner for the General Surgery Certifying Exam. He also contributed to the development of the focused practice designation examination in bariatric surgery.
Beyond the American Board of Surgery, Kothari has held several leadership positions. He is a past president of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, The Fellowship Council, the Southwestern Surgical Congress and the Wisconsin Surgical Society.
Tejal S. Brahmbhatt
Tejal S. Brahmbhatt, M.D., has been appointed to the Surgical Critical Care Board. He is an associate professor of surgery, chief of surgical critical care and program director of surgical critical care and the ACS fellowship at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
His clinical practice focuses on acute care surgery, including trauma, emergency general surgery and surgical critical care.
Brahmbhatt completed his internship in general surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and his general surgery residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
He subsequently completed a fellowship in traumatology, emergency general surgery and surgical critical care at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
His clinical and research interests include surgical education, the psychological impact of surgical education on mental health and point-of-care ultrasound.
In addition to his new appointment, Brahmbhatt serves as an examiner for the ABS General Surgery Certifying Exam and as an ABS examination consultant for the General Surgery Continuous Certification Assessment.
He is also the current president of the Society of Asian Academic Surgeons and serves as the Society of Critical Care Medicine's appointee to the editorial board of the Surgical Council on Resident Education.
Brahmbhatt serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Surgical Research, the American Journal of Surgery and the Global Surgical Education Journal of the Association for Surgical Education.
He has also appeared on Behind the Knife: The Surgery Podcast for a series focusing on shame in surgical education.
The appointments of Kothari and Brahmbhatt add to their existing leadership, examination and academic roles within the US surgical and medical education system.
