Dr. Katlic is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington and Jefferson College and an Alpha Omega Alpha graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He completed residencies in Surgery and Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital. A practicing thoracic surgeon since 1984, Dr. Katlic also earned a Master of Medical Management degree from the John Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at CarnegieMellonUniversity in 1999.
Dr. Katlic has had a special interest in caring for the elderly for over 35 years. His paper, “Surgery in Centenarians,” was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1985 and he went on to publish seven textbooks and to lecture frequently on this subject. As a thoracic surgeon Dr. Katlic has pioneered video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) under local anesthesia and sedation, with results of 576 cases published in 2017.
Dr. Katlic is presently Chair Emeritus of the Department of Surgery at LifeBridge Health System in Baltimore, Maryland. He also founded the Sinai Center for Geriatric Surgery. In 2014 Dr. Katlic established The Aging Surgeon Program, a comprehensive, objective evaluation of a surgeon’s cognitive and physical faculties, at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, a program that he continues to direct. He was named Maryland Innovator of the Year in 2013 and Maryland Physician of the Year in 2019; he received the Maryland Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. In his free time he trains for triathlons.
In 2024 Dr. Katlic published a medical thriller novel, Thorax.
