Stephan Ariyan
Dr. Stephan Ariyan is the Frank F. Kanthak Professor Emeritus of Surgery, Plastic Surgery, and Otolaryngology at Yale School of Medicine. After completing his training in both general surgery and plastic surgery at Yale, he was asked to join the faculty in 1976. He was professor and chief of the Division of Plastic Surgery at Yale from 1979 to 1991, associate chief of the Department of Surgery from 2007 to 2013, and the director of the Yale Melanoma Unit at the Yale Cancer Center, the center’s first multidisciplinary team, which he founded in 1976.
Following the devastating earthquake in Armenia in December 1988, he was invited by the government of the then Soviet Union to help the many victims. He selected a team of surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses from Armenia, whom he trained at Yale from 1990 to 1991, with the joint collaboration of the USAID, the ECFMG, the RRC for Plastic Surgery, the Yale School of Medicine, and Yale New Haven Hospital. The success of this effort has been cited by the USAID as the model for the implementation of health care improvement in other countries.
He has served as vice chair of the American Board of Plastic Surgery and president of five national surgical societies. In 1986, he founded the National Match for Plastic Surgery Residency.
Dr. Ariyan has been awarded numerous recognitions including the Presidential Award of the Republic of Armenia, the Medal of Honor from New York Medical College, the Scholar Award from the American College of Surgeons, the Presidential Award from the Society of Head and Neck Surgeons, the Presidential Citation from the American Head and Neck Society, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the New England Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, and the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award from Marquis Who’s Who.
He has authored or co-authored more than 300 scientific papers and five surgical books (one of them, The Hand Book, has been published in three editions, in English, Spanish, and Japanese). He has served on the editorial boards of two surgical journals, and is the founding editor-in-chief of the online Yale Surgical Videos. His former residents have honored him with the endowed Ariyan Lectureship for an annual lecture in the Department of Surgery.