Human Organ Transplant Authority (HOTA) of Punjab, Vice-chancellor of the University of Health Sciences and a former vice-chancellor of the King Edward Medical University Lahore, Prof Dr. Faisal Masood (Tamgha-e-Imtiaz) passed away on Friday.
Prof Dr. Faisal Masood suffered cardiac arrest and was rushed to Iqra Medical Complex where he was pronounced dead.
He obtained his MBBS degree in 1976, from Nishtar Medical College, Multan, securing overall top position and was selected as the ‘best graduate’. He became a Member of Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, Glasgow and London in 1982 and a Fellow of Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh in 1998. His area of interest is endocrinology.
Prof Dr. Faisal Masood started his teaching career from Allama Iqbal Medical College in 1982 and then moved on to teach at FJMC, King Edward Medical College, Lahore, Post Graduate Medical Institute, Lahore and Services Institute of Medical Sciences, Lahore.
He was passionate in his belief that the medical colleges and universities should adopt liberalism. He encouraged basic research and sometimes referred clinical research as mere “stamp collecting effort”. Although he himself started as a clinical researcher with numerous research publications to his credit, over time his emphasis shifted more towards the basic research.
Prof Dr. Faisal Masood wanted to create a multi-disciplinary research group as he often said, “The best research proposals come from cross insemination of ideas from unrelated fields”. He managed to create an endowment fund for SIMS to provide annual research grants to the promising young researchers. In this process, he established a system of grant assessment and research audit.
In 2003, in the face of stiff administrative opposition, he started a comprehensive diabetes management center at services hospital Lahore where he was serving as a professor at that time. His daughter helped him to write software for this center to create a huge database of more than 84,000 patients with diabetes. This center was upgraded with philanthropic support in 2004 to the full-fledged department of endocrinology and metabolism to impart post-graduate endocrine training. In recognition of this effort, College of Physicians and Surgeons of Pakistan (CPSP) elected him as its first fellow in the field of endocrinology.—INP
