James Y. Suen

Suen was diagnosed with cancer earlier in 2026 and stopped seeing patients after fifty years. On 29 October 2026 UAMS hosted his Last Lecture in the Fred W. Smith Auditorium; he appeared in a wheelchair, spoke briefly, and had department chair Gresham Richter deliver the rest of his prepared talk before a crowd of about 400 that included Jerry Jones and videotaped remarks from Bill Clinton.

He died on the morning of 4 November 2026 in Little Rock, aged 86. UAMS Chancellor C. Lowry Barnes announced the death. The family said no additional funeral service was planned and asked for donations to the UAMS Department of Otolaryngology in his honour.

James Yee Suen was born on 9 October 1940 in Dermott, Arkansas, the son of Chinese immigrant grocers Yee Gao Suen and Mary Chiang, and one of nine children. He was born while the Chinese Exclusion Act still barred Chinese immigration, and as a child he was among the few students of colour in local schools. The family grocery served Black sharecroppers and Japanese Americans interned nearby, and Suen later said that ethic of serving everyone shaped his medicine.

A roadside accident he helped at as a college student, and a conversation with his sister Laura, a nurse, pushed him toward medicine. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin, earned his M.D. at UAMS in 1966, interned at San Francisco General Hospital, served two years in the Air Force, then returned to UAMS for surgical and otolaryngology training. After a fellowship at MD Anderson Cancer Center he joined the UAMS faculty in 1974. He had first intended cardiac surgery under mentor Masauki Hara; after Hara died of head and neck cancer, Suen switched to ENT.

Suen chaired the UAMS Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery from 1974 to 2017, the longest tenure of any chair in the specialty nationwide. With Kent Westbrook he pressed university leaders to create a dedicated cancer centre; the Arkansas Cancer Research Center opened in 1989 and grew into the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, which Suen later led for seven years.

He specialised in advanced head and neck cancer and reconstructive surgery, often taking patients turned away elsewhere, and kept a personal phone number available to them. He treated President Bill Clinton for years, operated on Charley Pride's vocal cord cancer in 1994, and counted Roy Scheider and Sam Walton among his patients. Into his eighties he made five medical missions to Ukraine for reconstructive work on children and wounded soldiers while training Ukrainian surgeons.

He trained more than a hundred residents and fellows, won multiple teaching awards, served as president of the American Head and Neck Society, and received distinguished alumni awards from MD Anderson and UAMS. Colleagues described him as still working seventy hour weeks late in his career.

Suen was married to Karen and was the father of Brent, Tiffany, Brad and Brennan. He was predeceased by former wife Carol Gee, by six siblings, and by his parents. Survivors also include sisters Mary and Judy and grandchildren Sophia, Vivian, Ethan and Violet. Friends remembered a lasting sweet tooth for See's candy and homemade macarons, and a habit of putting patients up in the family guest room when they needed somewhere to stay in Little Rock.

Suen left behind a department he had led for nearly half a century, a cancer institute he helped create, and generations of surgeons he trained. Tributes from Barnes, Westbrook, Richter, Clinton and Jerry Jones stressed both technical skill and a patient centred kindness that colleagues called unusual in academic surgery. His Ukraine missions and Last Lecture cemented a public memory of a physician who stayed in Arkansas by choice and kept operating for others into old age.