Hesham Masoud, MD, who joined the faculty at Upstate nearly a decade ago, has been appointed as director of the Upstate Medical University Simulation Center. In this role, he oversees the Simulation Center and the Clinical Skills Center, and the highly skilled team members who support the simulation and standardized patient programs.

The Simulation Center of is part of a coordinated network of simulation resources that, together, provide realistic intra and inter professional experiential learning for Upstate Medical University.  With low and high-fidelity task trainers and manikins the Center is able to support the diverse learning and training needs of Upstate Medical community. With approximately 8,600 square feet, the Center offers specialized rooms for skills and task training, immersive patient care simulation, and debriefing simulated sessions. The center complements Upstate’s Clinical Skills Center, that features 22 exam rooms, closed-circuit monitoring, and state-of-the-art medical equipment. In this space students shape their “bedside manner” and clinical skills with standardized patients or actors role-playing as patients.

Masoud is a vascular and interventional neurologist and associate professor of neurology, neurosurgery and radiology. He is director of the Vascular Neurology Fellowship Program and is a certified healthcare simulation educator in the Society for Simulation in Healthcare. 

Masoud has incorporated simulation into his teaching and curriculum development. He conceived and instituted a novel residency pathway using simulation for early sub specialization training in Stroke Neurointervention at Upstate. He developed simulation lab training for early management of stroke for resident training as a fellow and assistant professor at Boston Medical Center. Learners describe his teaching style as engaging, supportive, and challenging in a positive way, helping them correlate underlying anatomy and physiology with clinical presentation and management.

Masoud completed a combined fellowship in Endovascular Surgical Neuroradiology and Vascular Neurology at Boston Medical Center and was assistant professor in the departments of Neurology and Radiology before joining the faculty at Upstate Medical University in 2015.

Masoud has been honored with numerous awards for outstanding teaching at both Boston University and at Upstate, including the Best Teaching Attending Award from the Adult Neurology Residency Program graduating class of 2021and the recognition by medical students in the Exceptional Teaching Program in Upstate’s College of Medicine in 2022, among others.

He took over as director of the Simulation Center last year and brings to the job a passion for simulation as big goals for the center.

Internally, he plans to expand simulation experiences in nursing education as well as incorporate increased simulation training for all educators. To put Upstate’s center on the national map, he is working on getting the center accredited.

“If you're a clinician educator in health sciences or otherwise, then you should be learning about sim; how to implement it and use it in your pedagogy because it is the future,” he said. “It is the way people optimally learn.”

Other goals for the center are to engage the community in ways that include standardized patient vocational training, using the lab for startup companies to test their products.

Caption: Hesham Masoud, MD, the new director of Upstate Simulation Center.