Dr. Frank Lewis received his BA in physics from Princeton University and his medical degree from the University of Maryland Medical School. He completed an internship at San Francisco General Hospital and a general surgery residency at the University of California San Francisco. Dr. Lewis then completed an NIH fellowship in trauma with his mentor Dr. William Blaisdell, who founded the first trauma center in the country in San Francisco in 1966.

Dr. Lewis served as faculty member at UC San Francisco from 1973-1992, rising from Assistant Professor to Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Surgery, and Chief of Surgery at San Francisco General Hospital. From 1992-2002 he served as Chair of the Department of Surgery at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. Dr. Lewis recently completed a 15-year term (2002-2017) as executive director of the American Board of Surgery (ABS).

Dr. Lewis is a past chair of both the ABS and the ACGME Review Committee for Surgery. He is also a past president of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma and the Shock Society. He also served as first Vice President of the American College of Surgeons (ACS), as well as chair of the ACS Board of Governors.

Dr. Lewis' clinical interests have centered on trauma and critical care, and his research has focused on cardiopulmonary physiology and acute respiratory failure. He collaborated with Dr. Virgil Elings of UC Santa Barbara to develop the lung water computer, which allows the quantitation of pulmonary edema using the double indicator technique. He and Dr. Elings established the validity of the technique in humans and a variety of animal models. More recent work has focused on critical care physiology and specifically the cardiopulmonary effects of sepsis and the effects of vascular resistance on cardiac output.