Benjamin S Abella, MD

Benjamin S. Abella, MD, MPhil, is the System Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Mount Sinai Health System. 

Dr. Abella leads the Department of Emergency Medicine’s clinical and basic research enterprise; upholds the high quality of emergency services across the Health System; and fosters a strong academic environment for the education of student, residents, clinical fellows, and postdoctoral fellows.  He promotes the equitable advancement of the Mount Sinai Emergency Medicine Team through mentoring, educational programs, and appropriate support. 

Dr. Abella is a Mount Sinai Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.  Before joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Abella served as the William G. Baxt Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Perlman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and held roles including the Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Emergency Medicine, Director of the Center for Resuscitation Science, and Director of the Penn Acute Research Collaboration. 

As a national leader in the study of sudden cardiac arrest and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), he was one of the first investigators to develop quantitative methods to measure and assess CPR delivery, playing a key role in helping to advance defibrillator technology to improve CPR performance.  He has led numerous clinical studies on cardiac arrest and post-arrest care and has authored more than 280 published works in leading medical journals, as well as book chapters. 

Dr. Abella has served as Chair of the American Heart Association (AHA) national 3CPR Council and has created international guidelines for resuscitation care through his work with the AHA. He is the emergency care and CPR consultant to the National Basketball Association, and has worked with the United States Air Force in the development of post-arrest care protocols. In Philadelphia, he has led a longstanding community-based CPR training program for disadvantaged communities, which has trained more than 10,000 people in CPR delivery.

Among his many honors are an American Heart Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Pennsylvania Medical Society Practitioner of the Year Award, and election as a Fellow of the European Resuscitation Council and as a Fellow of the American Heart Association.

Dr. Abella received his MD from The John Hopkins University School of Medicine, earned a master’s degree in genetics from Cambridge University, and completed residencies in internal medicine and emergency medicine at the University of Chicago.