# Rezvi Sheriff

Mohamed Hussain Rezvi Sheriff is a Sri Lankan academic, nephrologist, and physician. He served as director of the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, senior professor of medicine, and head of the Department of Clinical Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo. He has been a senior professor of medicine at General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University since 2018. He is a consultant physician and nephrologist at the National Hospital of Sri Lanka. He is also the founder and owner of Western Hospital.

## Education

Sheriff began his formal education at Zahira College, Colombo, and later received a scholarship to transfer to Royal College Colombo. He subsequently entered the Faculty of Medicine there, obtaining a Bachelor of Medicine, a Bachelor of Surgery, and a Doctor of Medicine. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and the Ceylon College of Physicians.

## Career

He was appointed as a lecturer in medicine in the Department of Medicine under Professor Kumaradasa Rajasuriya in 1973. He obtained his MRCP after completing his postgraduate training in the UK and returned to Sri Lanka. He is claimed to have had one of the longest academic careers in the Sri Lankan university system.
Sheriff collaborated with A. H. Sheriffdeen to set up the first transplant program in Sri Lanka in October 1985, and with the assistance of the Colombo University team, they accomplished the first kidney transplant performed in Sri Lanka. Sheriff and Surendra Ramachandran pioneered the specialty of nephrology in Sri Lanka, nearly 1,000 transplants have been performed under Sheriff's supervision. He was appointed as Professor of Medicine in 1990 and promoted eight years later to Senior Professor of Medicine in 1998.
He is a senior advisory board member to SACTRC (South Asian Clinical Toxicology Research Collaboration) with Nimal Senanayake, Ravindra Fernando and Janaka de Silva. He founded the OxCol (University of Oxford Colombo link) for studies on snake bites and yellow oleander poisoning. He was president of the Sri Lanka Medical Association, Ceylon College of Physicians, Sri Lanka Association for Nephrology and Transplantation, SAARC Society of Nephrology, Urology and Transplant Surgery and the Founder President of the Hypertension Society in Sri Lanka in addition to being a founder of the Health Informatics Society in Sri Lanka and a councilor of the International Society of Nephrology. Rezvi is an External Examiner for MRCP in UK & Chennai. He is the Ceylon College of Physicians Coordinator for MRCP Examinations in Sri Lanka. He was appointed as the President of Sri Lanka Medical Association in 2009.
He has published academic articles on nephrology, organ transplantation, snake bites, and oleander poisoning.
Sheriff is also the founder and chairman of Western Infirmary Hospital in Colombo, a center for renal disease care, dialysis, and transplantation. In 2011, he was rated as the most prolific scientist from Sri Lanka according to the Web of Science database.
He retired from the University of Colombo on September 30, 2014, after rendering 41 years of service.

## Honours and awards

He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, Honorary Fellow of the College of General Practitioners of Sri Lanka and a Fellow of the National Academy of Science of Sri Lanka.
The titular prestigious honour Vidya Jyothi was conferred upon him by the Government of Sri Lanka in 1993 in recognition of his contribution to nephrology, dialysis and transplantation in Sri Lanka. He also received a Lion International Merit Award.

## Controversy

In 2019, Sheriff filed complaints with the Criminal Investigation Department over allegations which surfaced in social media which revealed that he treated Zahran Hashim, who was the prime suspect behind the 2019 Sri Lanka Easter bombings.

## Personal life

In October 2022, Sheriff underwent a kidney transplant at the Western Infirmary/Western Hospital.