Dean
Carle Illinois College of Medicine

Mark S. Cohen, MD, FSSO, FACS, is Dean of the Carle Illinois College of Medicine - the world’s first engineering based medical school - at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Senior Vice President and Chief Academic Officer of Carle Health. He is also Professor of Surgery and Biomedical and Translational Sciences in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, Professor of Bioengineering in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a member of the Cancer Center of Illinois and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at UIUC. Dean Cohen holds a B.S. degree in chemical engineering and M.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. He is board certified by the American Board of Surgery and is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and is a Fellow of the Society of Surgical Oncology. He has held several national leadership positions in surgical societies and is a founding member and program co-lead of the international Holomedicine Association and currently is Chair of the American College of Surgeons’ Committee on Emerging Surgical Technology and Education. Dean Cohen is a practicing Surgical Oncologist treating patients with advanced endocrine malignancies as well as melanomas. He has run an NIH R01-funded translational oncology laboratory for the last 15 years working on developing novel therapeutics and diagnostics for the treatment and staging of advanced cancers as well as new programs in tissue engineering, AI and machine learning in health care decision-making, and use of extended reality technologies in teaching, skills development, and health-care delivery. He developed several educational programs in Innovation and entrepreneurship for medical students, residents, and faculty as well as co-founding five start-up companies to improve the care of surgical patients. He has mentored over 200 faculty, residents, and students on surgical innovation projects, advised numerous startups and delivered over 100 invited national and international talks, published over 120 original scientific articles, 13 book chapters, as well as a textbook on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in academic medicine.