Steve Thomas, MD

Dr. Stephen Thomas’ current academic appointments are in the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and also as a Senior Lecturer at Barts & The London School of Medicine in the UK. He finished LSU's six-year MD program in 1990, moving to North Carolina to train in Emergency Medicine (EM) at East Carolina University. After a fellowship in Air Medical Transport, he joined the faculty at HMS, clinically based at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1999, he obtained a Masters in Public Health (with a concentration in Quantitative Methods) at Harvard. Over the course of sixteen years at HMS, Thomas was primarily involved with medical student education and helicopter EMS; he also served as a founding faculty member of the Harvard Affiliated EM Residency. In 2009 Thomas moved to an administrative leadership post as the inaugural Kaiser Foundation Professor & Chairman of a new Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Oklahoma. During his tenure, the university developed a new EM residency and graduated its first class, after which Thomas moved (in 2015) to the position of clinical leadership of government-operated Emergency Departments in the national healthcare system of the State of Qatar. He served, with duties including assistance in the country’s preparations as Qatar’s national system chairman for Emergency Medicine for the FIFA World Cup event. In Qatar, Thomas also served as Emergency Physician-in-Chief at the country’s Level I trauma center, Hamad General Hospital (where the four-story ED sees an annual volume of approximately 400,000 patients). After completion of the World Cup in 2022, Thomas returned to the HMS, where he is now based at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He assists with education, research, and faculty development. Thomas continues to have particular interest in helicopter EMS transport, working with his department’s EMS Division to coordinate projects such as the international Critical Care Transport Collaborative Outcomes Research Effort.