John Morton

Dr. John Morton is Associate Professor of Surgery at Stanford University serving as Section Chief of Minimally Invasive Surgery and Director of both Bariatric Surgery and Surgical Quality. He also heads the Minimally Invasive Surgery fellowship and the Stanford Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (SCORE) and is Co-Director of the Stanford Digestive Health Center. Dr. Morton received undergraduate, Masters in Public Health, and Medical Doctor Degrees from Tulane University and a Masters in Health Administration from University of Washington. He was the first surgical resident to receive a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Fellowship in the program's history at University of Washington and also completed an advanced laparoscopic fellowship at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He served on Capitol Hill as Senator Bill Frist's Health Policy Intern.

He has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles and 10 book chapters with over 100 national and international oral presentations. His research has focused on quality improvement and bariatric surgery and has published influential articles on patient safety, adolescent bariatric surgery, diabetes and gastric bypass, fertility and birth outcomes following weight loss surgery, probiotics, pre-operative weight loss, endoscopy, and impact of gastric bypass upon alcohol metabolism and cardiac risk factors. He led two FDA Pivotal Trials and has received funding from National Institutes of Health and American College of Surgeons. He serves as editor of two books and on the editorial boards of Obesity Surgery, Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases and World Journal of Gastroenterology. His research efforts have been recognized by the Society for Advanced Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) receiving the Golden Laparoscope as 2008 Young Investigator of the Year. As a teacher, Dr. Morton has received three teaching awards at Stanford University including the 2008 Arthur Bloomfield Clinical Teacher of the Year.

As Director of Surgical Quality at Stanford University Medical Center, Dr. Morton led efforts to improve the Department of Surgery's University Health Consortium's annual ranking from 24/98 to 1/98 and their Annual NSQIP mortality ranking from Average to Exemplary. Among all NSQIP Surgical Champions, he was chosen to chair the monthly Surgical Champions forum for the American College of Surgeons. He has been an invited speaker on surgical quality by the American College of Surgeons, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, National Patient Safety Foundation, and American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery.

With over 1500 bariatric surgeries performed, he has been recognized as a bariatric surgery leader by RAND, American College of Surgeons, Who's Who and America's Top Surgeons and served as President of the California chapter of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS) in 2010. He has had invited presentations on weight loss surgery at Vanderbilt and Harvard Universities and internationally in the United Kingdom, Mexico, Germany, and France. He received top presentation awards from SAGES, ASMBS, and Digestive Diseases Week. Dr. Morton has been featured on the Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Newsweek, Medscape, Washington Post, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, International Herald Tribune, Reuters, United Press International, and Associated Press.