Professor Francis A. Abantanga MD, Pediatric Surgeon, Ph.D., FWACS, FGCS

Professor Francis A. Abantanga, MD, is a Professor of Paediatric Surgery and former Dean of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences (renamed School of Medicine in 2021), University for Development Studies, Tamale, Ghana. He is a consultant general paediatric surgeon at the Tamale Teaching Hospital, where he teaches paediatric surgery to both undergraduate medical students and surgery residents. Since January 2021, he also teaches general surgery to clinical year 1 (PBL 4) and clinical year 3 (PBL 6) students of the School of Medicine, UDS. He actively mentors medical students and young aspiring surgical residents to become surgeons of high repute.
He earned his MD at Kharkov State Medical Institute in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1982. He returned to the Ukrainian Republic in 1992 to complete a residency training in paediatric surgery, obtaining a PhD after successfully passing the relevant examinations and defending his dissertation titled “Postoperative intestinal obstruction in children” in the Moscow Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia. He returned to Ghana in 1992 and became a lecturer (1994) in the Department of Surgery, School of Medical Sciences (SMS), Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and Directorate of Surgery, Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH), Kumasi, Ghana, where he rose to become a Professor of Paediatric Surgery in 2009. He has held the positions of Head of Department/Directorate of Surgery and Vice Dean of SMS, KNUST. He moved to Tamale to become the substantive Dean of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences of the University for Development Studies in July, 2015. He held various key positions both in KNUST/KATH and UDS such as chairman of committees.
Prof Francis Abantanga is an astute scholar, an excellent teacher, a good listener and has participated (and still does) in many research works on various childhood disease conditions (and also medical research in general). He has around one hundred (100) peer-reviewed articles in reputable journals and about twelve (12) book chapters in various books of surgery.
At one time he was the secretary and eventually the chairman of the Faculty of Surgery, Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is the chairman of two committees of the West African College of Surgeons (WACS): The Endowment Board of Trustees, Ghana, and the Surgical Outreach Programme Committee (organised a very successful outreach to Liberia in March, 2022); the Vice Chairman of the Jim Nwobodo Prize Committee and a member of two other committees of the same College. Prof Abantanga was a member of the Governing Boards of Tamale Teaching Hospital and Medical and Dental Council of Ghana. He is, at present, the Chairman of the Bolgatanga Technical University Governing Council in the Upper East Region of Ghana.

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