ACEP Award for Outstanding Contribution to Research

Congratulations to Ahamed H. Idris, MD who received the 2021 ACEP Award for Outstanding Contribution in Research!

For those who don’t know Ahamed, he began his medical career in the US Army, trained as a clinical specialist, he served as a medic with the 1^st Air Cavalry in Vietnam from 1969-70. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal. He discovered his love of biology and medicine in the Army. After military service, he attended Northwestern University and Rush Medical College in Chicago. He did his residency at Cook County Hospital and was co-author of a study on transfers to a public hospital published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1986. This study led to the EMTALA law. He is grateful for the training he received at Cook County Hospital and especially because he met his wife on Ward 24.

In 1986, he joined the Emergency Medicine faculty at the University of Florida. There he focused his research on laboratory models of low blood flow states such as shock and cardiac arrest. After learning how to do really good CPR in pigs for sixteen years, he was ready to apply this knowledge to human resuscitation. In 2004, he began serving as the Dallas-Fort Worth PI for the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium, a group focused on clinical trials for cardiac arrest and trauma. He has been with UT Southwestern Medical Center since 2003.         

He served as the National Chair of Basic Life Support for the American Heart Association, as a consultant to the National Institutes of Health, the US Army, and NASA. Dr. Idris was the Director of the NASA Human Space Flight Rescue Team for the Space Shuttle from 1994 to 2003. He was inducted into the NASA Space Technology Hall of Fame in 2008 for work he did on the impedance threshold device, which is now onboard the International Space Station.