Dr. Atiya Dhala is an intensivist in Houston Methodist Hospital’s Surgical Liver ICU (SLICU) in the Texas Medical Center. She served as the inaugural Medical Director of Houston Methodist’s Virtual ICU. In addition to her clinical responsibilities, Dr. Dhala is the Director of Educational and Translational Research in Critical Care in the department of Surgery.  She is also an Associate Professor of Medicine in Clinical Surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and at the Institute for Academic Medicine at Houston Methodist.

Dr. Dhala attended Madras Medical College in Chennai, India, and completed her residency and fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center, the University Hospital for the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

With more than two and a half decades of clinical experience, Dr. Dhala has built an academic, clinical, and research career focused on improving outcomes and quality of life for high-risk surgical and critically ill patients through multidisciplinary, patient-centered care that extends beyond the ICU. She founded and leads Houston Methodist’s Comprehensive Multimodal Prehabilitation Program (CMMP), a system-wide initiative designed to optimize frail patients before major surgery through structured exercise, nutrition, behavioral support, and risk-factor modification. Throughout her career, Dr. Dhala has received numerous awards recognizing her dedication to education, mentorship, and teaching.