Dr. James Suen, professor and chairman of the Department of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery at UAMS, personifies excellence in his life and his work.
The son of Chinese immigrant parents who settled in Dermott, Suen received his medical degree from UAMS in 1966 and has spent 50 years leading the hospital to the upper echelons of care in his chosen field of medicine.
“What interested me about this field is the challenge of doing major surgical procedures on the head and neck and being able to reconstruct the defects,” he said. “I wanted to help people in a significant way.”
Suen is known as one of the world’s authorities on surgical procedures involving head and neck cancer, congenital vascular lesions of the head and neck, and diseases of the larynx.
“The complexity of the cancers and of the vascular anomalies that I see and treat is what I find most challenging,” he said. “These are the patients that most doctors have nothing to offer.”
Suen has worked not only to correct this fact for his own patients, but to share his extensive knowledge through education. He was one of the co-founders of the Arkansas Cancer Research Center and was its Executive Director from 2002 to 2007. He’s also authored and edited six medical textbooks, including Cancer of the Head and Neck, which is used worldwide by medical schools.
His list of accolades in the classrooms of UAMS College of Medicine is a long one. Suen has been awarded the Red Sash Award for Teaching on multiple occasions and received the 1990 Distinguished Faculty Award.
He’s also one of the few physicians who can list a U.S. president among his patients, serving as President Bill Clinton’s personal physician through his two-term administration. In 1995, he was selected by Good Housekeeping as one of the top 400 cancer specialists in the United States. Since that time, he has been listed in all editions of Best Doctors in America.
Most recently, he was the inaugural recipient of the Patricia and J. Floyd Kyser, M.D. Chair in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at UAMS earlier this year, an award he accepted with characteristic grace and humility.
“I guess [these awards] mean I have been doing some good for my patients,” he said.
Highlights
Dr. James Suen is an internationally known physician in his field, with six textbooks to his credit that are used in medical schools worldwide. A decorated instructor at UAMS, he is one of the co-founders of the Arkansas Cancer Research Center and was executive director from 2002 to 2007. The personal physician of President Bill Clinton during his two terms, Suen was named one of Good Housekeeping’s top 400 cancer specialists in the United States in 1995.
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