A surgeon and medical-center administrator who has spent most of his career in Massachusetts will become the new president and chief executive officer of Rhode Island Hospital.

Dr. Timothy J. Babineau, the senior vice president and chief medical officer for the University of Maryland Medical Center, will assume the top spot at the state’s largest hospital on Oct. 1.

Leaders of Rhode Island Hospital’s parent company, Lifespan, planned to introduce Babineau at a news conference this morning.

Before going to Maryland in 2005, Babineau was vice chairman of the division of surgery, surgical residency program director, and director of the center for minimally invasive surgery at Boston Medical Center. He was also surgeon-in-chief and medical director for the Boston Medical Center Surgery Associates at Quincy Medical Center.

Babineau earned his bachelor’s degree at the College of the Holy Cross, where he was valedictorian, and obtained his medical degree at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he was the top medical graduate. Both schools are in Worcester. Babineau served his internship, residency and fellowship at New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston.

He will arrive at a time of flux for Rhode Island Hospital. One of the few hospitals to operate without a deficit, Rhode Island Hospital has been investing many millions of dollars in expansions and improvements. But its plan to start a bone-marrow transplant program was rejected by state regulators, a decision the hospital has appealed. And the hospital also endured repeated negative headlines last year, when its neurosurgeons, on three separate occasions in the same year, operated on the wrong side of a patient’s head.

Rhode Island Hospital is the main teaching hospital for the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, which plans to build a new medical school headquarters near the hospital. The former hospital president, Dr. Joseph F. Amaral, a surgeon, left his post in June 2007, with little explanation. The dean of the Alpert Medical School, Dr. Eli Y. Adashi, left his post this summer, also without giving a reason. George Vecchione, the president and chief executive at Lifespan, served as the hospital’s interim president.

But probably the biggest unknown in Rhode Island Hospital’s future is the fate of a merger proposal: its parent company, Lifespan, wants to combine with Care New England, the state’s other hospital group. Care New England includes Women & Infants Hospital, which is also affiliated with Brown and lies adjacent to Rhode Island Hospital. But the merger proposal faces an intense review by state regulators, and the hospitals have yet to complete their application.

Dr. Timothy J. Babineau, the senior vice president and chief medical officer for the University of Maryland Medical Center, will assume the top spot at the state’s largest hospital on Oct. 1.