Association for Academic Surgery (AAS)

15th Early Career Development Course

October 26, 2019 | San Francisco, CA

View the Course Handout
Elevator Pitch Session Instructions
View the Faculty Bios

COURSE PRESENTATIONS 

FACULTY BIOS

Shipra Arya, MD, SM
Dr. Arya is an Associate Professor of Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and the vascular section chief at the Palo Alto VA. Her health services research lab is located at the Stanford-Surgery Policy Improvement Research and Education Center (S-SPIRE). Her research focuses on frailty, and how it can be used to guide improvements in patient centered outcomes and healthcare value. Her recent grant funding included an American Heart Association (AHA) grant on risk prediction of cardiovascular outcomes and limb loss in Peripheral Arterial Disease (PAD) and  an NIH/NIA GEMSSTAR grant studying the impact of frailty on quality of surgical care in PAD and aortic aneurysms.

Karl Bilimoria, MD, MS
Dr. Bilimoria is the current President of the Association for Academic Surgery. He is the Director of the Surgical Outcomes and Quality Improvement Center (SOQIC) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Vice President for Quality for the health system, and the Vice Chair for Quality in the Department of Surgery. He is also the John B. Murphy Professor of Surgery, and his clinical practice focuses on melanoma and sarcoma. His research focuses on surgical quality measurement and improving the quality of healthcare for surgical and oncology patients, and he has a particular interest in large cluster-randomized trials.  He is the founding director of the 56-hospital Illinois Surgical Quality Improvement Collaborative (ISQIC).  He was the PI for the national FIRST Trial of resident duty hour policies and is the PI for the new SECOND Trial. His research is supported by the NIH, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, the American College of Surgeons (ACS), the American Board of Surgery (ABS), and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), and other societies.  He has published more than 350 peer-reviewed in articles, with multiple recent studies in JAMA and NEJM.  He is a Faculty Scholar at the American College of Surgeons.  He is the past President of the Surgical Outcomes Club. He was recently listed by Becker’s as one of the “Top 50 Experts Leading the Field of Patient Safety” in the U.S.

Dawn Coleman, MD
Dawn M. Coleman, MD is an Associate Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics & Communicable Disease at the University of Michigan where she serves as the Program Director for the Integrated Vascular Residency Program and Fellowship.  She graduated with honors from the University of Cincinnati in 1999 and earned her medical degree from the University of Cincinnati\\\’s College of Medicine in 2003.  She completed her general surgery residency at the University of Michigan in 2010 and then went on to complete a two-year vascular surgery fellowship at the same institution in 2012.  Her clinical interests include the surgical and endovascular management of aneurysmal and occlusive thoracoabdominal aortic and mesenteric vascular disease and the surgical revascularization of pediatric aortic coarctation and renovascular hypertension.  Her longstanding interest in the management children with developmental aortic coarctation and renovascular hypertension has fueled ongoing translational research interests that focus on the genetic basis of pediatric renovascular hypertension resulting from developmental arterial dysplasia.

Jamie Jones Coleman, MD
Dr. Jamie Jones Coleman is an acute care surgeon and Assistant Professor of Surgery at Indiana University in Indianapolis. She is also a freelance writer and media expert, regularly contributing to Huffington Post and US News & World Report.

Julia Coleman, MD, MPH
Julia Coleman is a PGY-5 General Surgery Resident at University of Colorado-Denver and a former NIH T32 Trauma Research Fellow with the University of Colorado Trauma Research Lab.   She earned her Bachelor\’s in Science from Elon University, her Master’s in Public Health from the Ohio State University, and then her Medical Degree from University of Toledo.  She is now completing her General Surgery residency at University of Colorado-Denver, with plans to specialize in Trauma Surgery and Surgical Critical Care.  Dr. Coleman is passionate about basic science research – her research interests are in trauma-induced coagulopathy and she is a recipient of several national grants through the NIH and DOD.  She is also passionate about leadership development and currently serves as the Candidate Representative on the AAS Leadership Committee, as well as RAS Vice Chair of the Advocacy and Issues Committee and RAS Liaison to the Committee on Trauma.

Justin Dimick, MD, MPH
Justin B. Dimick, MD, MPH is the Frederick A. Coller Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Surgery at the University of Michigan. Dr. Dimick has a clinical practice devoted to advanced laparoscopy, including treatment of morbid obesity, gastroesophageal reflux (GERD), abdominal wall hernias, and other benign and neoplastic diseases of the stomach, spleen, and foregut. Dr. Dimick has a large research program, currently funded by 5 R01 grants from the NIH and AHRQ, focuses on quality measurement, policy evaluation, and large-scale quality improvement interventions. He has more than 350 peer-reviewed publications, including papers in NEJM, JAMA, Health Affairs and the leading surgical journals. Dr. Dimick has served in leadership positions in several organizations, including President of the Association for Academic Surgery (AAS), Chair of the NIH Health Services Organization and Delivery (HSOD) Study Section, and on the Board of Directors of the Surgical Outcomes Club (SOC). He has served in advisory roles on quality and health care policy issues for several organizations, including the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), BlueCross BlueShield Association (BCBSA), and the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS-NSQIP).

Lesly Dossett, MD, MPH
Dr. Lesly Dossett MD, MPH is Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Division of Surgical Oncology at the University of Michigan. Dr. Dossett broadly studies the quality of cancer care delivery and is currently funded through a K08 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). She is an active member of multiple professional societies including AAS and currently serves on the AAS Leadership and Publications Committees.

T. Clark Gamblin, MD, MS, MBA
Dr. T. Clark Gamblin is a native of Jackson, Mississippi.  Dr. Gamblin obtained his BS from Mississippi State University and graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Medicine in 1998.  Dr. Gamblin then completed his general surgery residency at Mercer University followed by a surgical oncology fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh and then joined the University of Pittsburgh faculty in the Divisions of Transplantation and Surgical Oncology.  His clinical practice was focused on liver and pancreatic disease.  Shortly after joining the faculty, Dr. Gamblin obtained a Master of Science in clinical research from the University of Pittsburgh.  He also obtained NIH funding and served as a primary investigator on multiple liver clinical trials.  In December 2014, Dr. Gamblin obtained a Master of Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.

Dr. Gamblin is currently the Chief of Surgical Oncology and Professor of Surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin.  He holds the Stuart D. Wilson Chair in Surgical Oncology and leads the liver program at MCW.  His clinical interests include primary and metastatic liver cancer with a focus in laparoscopic liver surgery.  Dr. Gamblin has spoken often nationally and internationally regarding liver cancer and has over one-hundred peer reviewed publications and has mentored many medical students, residents and fellows. Dr. Gamblin also serves as the co-director of the Medical College of Wisconsin, Department of Surgery, Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Fellowship.  Additionally, he leads the comprehensive liver program in Milwaukee.  Dr. Gamblin and his wife, Holly, have three wonderful children.  When not at the hospital, he can be found with his family enjoying seasonal sports.

Caprice Greenberg, MD, MPH
Caprice Greenberg, MD, MPH is the Morgridge Distinguished Chair of Health Services Research and Professor of Surgery at the Unviersity of Wisconsin. Her research has been funded by PCORI, NCI, AHRQ and numerous foundations.  Dr. Greenberg is a founder and Past President of the Surgical Outcomes Club.  She previously served as Recorder and is a Past-President of the Association for Academic Surgery.

 

Adil Haider, MD, MPH
On Jan 1, 2019 Dr. Haider assumed office as the Dean of the Medical College of the Aga Khan University (AKU) in Karachi, Pakistan. He also has a part time appointment as Director of Disparities and Emerging Trauma Systems in the Department of Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

As Dean he leads the faculty of the first Joint Commission accredited healthcare institution in the country. AKU is routinely ranked #1 in the region. It is responsible for more than 80% of Biomedical research and an economic impact of 1 Billion USD in Pakistan. He is the Deputy Editor of JAMA Surgery and holds numerous leadership positions in national and international surgical organizations and colleges. Dr. Haider is credited with uncovering racial disparities after traumatic injury in the United States and establishing the field of trauma disparities research.

He is regarded as one of the foremost experts on healthcare inequities in the world, with projects focused on describing and mitigating unequal outcomes based on gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age and socioeconomic status. His other research focuses on long-term clinical and functional outcomes after trauma and optimal treatment of trauma/critically ill patients in resource-poor settings. He has formally mentored more than 100 research trainees, published more than 300 peer reviewed papers and currently serves as Principal Investigator (PI) on extramural grants worth more than twelve million dollars. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2017 Ellis Island Medal of Honor. Dr. Haider believes that equality is the cornerstone of medicine, and his professional goal is to eradicate disparities in healthcare around the globe.

Haytham Kaafarani, MD, MPH
Haytham Kaafarani is an Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and a Trauma & Acute Care Surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA. He serves as the Director of COMPASS, the Center for Outcomes & Patient Safety in Surgery, and the TESSCC Director of Research. He is a leading surgeon scientist with more than 200 peer review publications, specifically in the areas of surgical outcomes, patient safety and quality benchmarking. He is the creator of the Intraoperative Adverse Events Classification System, the Emergency Surgery Score (ESS), as well as POTTER, the AI-enabled Smartphone Perioperative Risk Calculator.

Rachel Kelz, MD, MSCE, MBA
Rachel R Kelz, MD MSCE MBA FACS graduated magna cum laude from Union College (Mathematics) in 1992 where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.  She received her medical degree cum laude from Yale University School of Medicine (cum laude) in 1997.  She went on to complete her internship (1998) and general surgery residency (2004) at the University of Pennsylvania.  While enrolled in the residency program, she earned a Masters degree in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002.   In 2018, Dr. Kelz earned an Executive Masters in Business Administration at the Wharton School and was appointed as a Professor of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a board-certified surgeon with an active endocrine surgical practice.  Dr. Kelz is an Associate Program Director of the General Surgery Residency Program, the founding Director of the Center for Surgery and Health Economics and the ACS NSQIP Surgeon Champion for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. In 2011, she received The Christian R and Mary F Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest teaching award given out by the University. She has received the Buzby Leadership Award and the Mentorship Award from the Department of Surgery. She is a senior scholar at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the Wharton School. Dr Kelz is a federally funded investigator with a particular interest in the eradication of surgical disparities and the advancement of surgical care using health services research methods, quality improvement methodology and innovative educational techniques.

Eugene Kim, MD
Dr. Eugene Kim is Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics, Division of Pediatric Surgery and Division of Hematology, Oncology, Blood and Marrow Transplantation at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles, California.  Dr. Kim has clinical expertise in pediatric surgical oncology, the management of chest wall deformities and anorectal malformations.  Dr. Kim is the principal investigator of a basic science laboratory focused on novel preclinical therapeutics for the aggressive childhood malignancy, neuroblastoma.  His research interests are focused on the mechanisms and pathways responsible for recurrent metastatic disease, the primary cause of death in children with high-risk neuroblastoma.

Cindy Kin, MD, MS
Cindy Kin is a colorectal surgeon and assistant professor of surgery at Stanford University. She completed her general surgery residency at Stanford and her colorectal fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. After returning to Stanford to be on the faculty, she earned a Masters degree in Health Services Research. Her clinical interests include inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer. Her research focuses on health care utilization and outcomes in inflammatory bowel disease, the use of mobile technology in perioperative care, and implementation of prehabilitation interventions.

Lindsay Kuo, MD, MBA
Dr. Kuo is an endocrine surgeon at Temple University. She completed her general surgery residency at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017; she received her MBA with a major in Health Care Management from the Wharton School of Business in 2015. Following residency Dr. Kuo completed the Endocrine Surgery fellowship at Brigham and Women\’s Hospital in Boston, finishing in 2018.

Elise Lawson, MD, MSHS
Elise H. Lawson, MD, MSHS is an Assistant Professor of Surgery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed General Surgery residency at UCLA and Colon and Rectal Surgery fellowship at the Lahey Hospital and Medical Center. She serves as the Associate Director of the Surgical Collaborative of Wisconsin, which aims to create a community of surgeons to improve the quality of surgical care across the state through a variety of specific QI initiatives. Her research focuses on decreasing variation in the delivery of colorectal cancer care and specifically addressing disparities in access, management and outcomes through greater use of informatics and surgical collaboratives.

Brenessa Lindeman, MD, MEHP
Brenessa Lindeman, MD, MEHP, is an Assistant Professor of Surgery and Associate Designated Institutional Official for the Clinical Learning Environment at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. A native of eastern Kentucky, she completed her undergraduate training summa cum laude at the University of Louisville and was the Founder\’s Medalist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.  She completed residency training in General Surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she served as an Administrative Chief Resident, and completed a fellowship in Endocrine Surgery at Brigham and Women\’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School.  Brenessa earned a Masters of Education in the Health Professions from Johns Hopkins University and completed Surgical Education Research Fellowships with the Association for Surgical Education and Massachusetts General Hospital.  She served as a member of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Core EPAs for Entering Residency Drafting Panel as well as the Resident Member of the AAMC Board of Directors from 2012-2016 and has worked with the American Board of Surgery to define EPAs for General Surgery.  Her research interests are in development and assessment of competency in surgical trainees, resident supervision and autonomy, and evaluation of the learning climate/physician wellness as an academic surgeon.

Carrie Lubitz, MD, MPH
Carrie C. Lubitz, MD, MPH, is an Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, Endocrine Surgeon in the Division of Surgical Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a Senior Scientist at the MGH Institute of Technology Assessment. In addition to her clinical practice, Dr. Lubitz has health-service and translational research interests including decision-analytic modeling to assess the comparative effectiveness and improve the quality of care of patients with endocrine-related disorders, with a focus on thyroid cancer. She has served as the Chair of the Clinical & Health Services Research Committee and is currently the Recorder.

Matthew Martin, MD
Colonel Matthew J. Martin is currently the Director of Trauma Research and Resident Education at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, CA. He recently retired from the U.S. Army where he served as the Trauma Medical Director and Chief of Surgical Critical Care at Madigan Army Medical Center (MAMC), Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. He was also the Director of Surgical Research and the former Associate Program Director for the MAMC General Surgery residency program. He is a Clinical Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, MD. COL Martin also serves as a staff trauma surgeon and the Director of Trauma Informatics at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland, Oregon. He is the current Chair of the Army State, Region 13, for the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma. He has deployed three times in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and twice in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Nader Massarweh, MD, MPH
Dr Massarweh is an Associate Professor of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine with a Surgical Oncology practice at the Michael E DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston, TX.  His training included a health services research fellowship at the Surgical Outcomes Research Center in the University of Washington Department of Surgery and an MPH in Epidemiology from the School of Public Health at the University of Washington.  His research interests include the quality of oncologic and surgical care, evaluating existing and proposed quality measures, and finding ways to improve the manner in which performance data are fed back to hospitals.  He has been PI of an AHRQ R03 and is currently PI of a VA HSR&D Merit Award.  He has been a member of the Association for Academic Surgery since 2008, has previously served on the Committee for Academic Advancement, the Leadership Committee, and is currently a member of the Clinical and Health Services Research Committee.

Arden Morris, MD, MPH
Arden M. Morris, MD, MPH is Professor of Surgery, Vice Chair for Clinical Research in the Stanford School of Medicine\’s Department of Surgery, and Director of the S-SPIRE Center, a health services research collaborative. Dr. Morris\’ research uses quantitative and qualitative research methods to focus primarily on socially determined disparities in the quality of cancer care, decision making for care, and patient-physician relationships. She serves as Co-Chair of the SUS Research Committee and Director of the American College of Surgeons biennial Health Services Research Methods Course.

Joseph Phillips, MD
Medical School: Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine
General Surgery Residency: McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University
Cardiothoracic Residency: University of Michigan
Staff Physician: Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Assistant Professor of Surgery: Dartmouth, Geisel School of Medicine
Associate Program Director, General Surgery Residency
Clinical Interests: General thoracic surgery, benign and malignant disease of the chest, lungs and esophagus
Research Interests: Tumor Immunology, Simulation, Resident Education, Surgical Outcomes

Susan Pitt, MD, MPHS
Susan C. Pitt, MD, MPHS, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Endocrine Surgery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Dr. Pitt is a health services researcher in the Wisconsin Surgical Outcomes Research (WiSOR) program. Her research is funded by the National Cancer Institute and focuses on reducing over-treatment in patients with low-risk thyroid cancer. Dr. Pitt received her Bachelors of Arts degree from Boston College and medical degree from the Medical College of Wisconsin. She finished her general surgery residency at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine where she was an Administrative Chief Resident.  She has a Masters degree in Population Health Science and completed an Endocrine Surgery fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Matthew Porembka, MD
Matthew Porembka, MD is an Assistant Professor of Surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center and the Chief of Surgical Oncology at Parkland Hospital.  His clinical practice focuses on the treatment of liver, pancreas, and stomach cancers.  He also maintains an active translational research program examining the biologic basis of gastric cancer disparities.

 

Elsie Ross, MD, MSc
Dr. Ross is a vascular surgeon and Assistant Professor of Surgery and Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on using big data and advanced analytics to identify novel risk factors for vascular disease, and developing and implementing automated risk stratification tools.

Ulka Sachdev, MD
Dr. Sachdev is an Associate Professor of Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. She is the site chief for vascular surgery at one of the local hospitals at UPMC and an associate program director for the trainees. She has a funded research program studying danger signals and inflammation in peripheral arterial disease.

Arghavan Salles, MD, PhD
Dr. Salles completed her medical training as well as a PhD (in education) at Stanford University. After her fellowship in Minimally Invasive Surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, she remained there as faculty. Her research focuses on gender equity and physician well-being.

Heena Santry, MD, MS
Dr. Santry is an acute care surgeon at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. She is an Associate Professor of Surgery and Vice-Chair for Health Services Research and Director, Center for Surgical Health Assessment, Research, & Policy (SHARP).  She is a multi-modal health services researcher who studies emergency general surgery structures, processes, and outcomes. She is funded by the AHRQ to study the impact of the dissemination of acute care surgery nationally.

Dorry Segev, MD, PhD
Dorry Segev, MD, PhD, is the Marjory K. and Thomas Pozefsky Professor of Surgery and Epidemiology and Associate Vice Chair of Surgery at Johns Hopkins University. He is the founder and director of the Epidemiology Research Group in Organ Transplantation (ERGOT), the largest and most prolific group of its kind in the world. Dr. Segev was the first to demonstrate the survival benefit of incompatible kidney transplantation across the United States, and is responsible for the first HIV-to-HIV transplants in the United States. His NIH-funded research includes kidney exchange, desensitization, long-term donor risk, access to transplantation, expanding transplantation including HIV+ donors, geographic disparities, post-transplant outcomes, and the intersection between transplantation and gerontology. With a graduate degree in biostatistics, Dr. Segev focuses on novel statistical and mathematical methods for simulation of medical data, analysis of large healthcare datasets, and outcomes research.  Dr. Segev has published over 400 peer-reviewed research articles, including 15 in JAMA, NEJM, and Lancet and over 150 in the American Journal of Transplantation. Reflecting this publication track record, he was recently awarded the American Society of Transplantation\’s Clinical Science Investigator Award. He is a current councilor of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons and former chair of the American Transplant Congress. His work has directly influenced policy, including two Congressional bills (the Norwood Act for kidney exchange and the HOPE Act for HIV-to-HIV transplants), and is regularly featured in widely read media including TIME magazine, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.  Dr. Segev is most inspired by his role as a mentor, having mentored over 100 graduate students, residents, and faculty, and is the only general surgeon in the US funded by an NIH/NIDDK Mentoring Grant.

Jesse Smith, MD, PhD
Dr. Smith, a surgeon-scientist specializing in rectal cancer, is an Assistant Member and Attending Surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). He received an M.D. degree from the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and a Ph.D. in cell and developmental biology from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he also completed his residency. He completed a clinical fellowship in surgical oncology at MSK where he focused on colorectal cancer. He is a board-certified surgeon on the Colorectal Surgery Service at MSK, where he cares for people with rectal, colon, and anal cancer. He uses both conventional and minimally invasive surgical approaches with the goal of optimizing oncologic outcomes and patients\’ quality of life.

Dr. Smith conducts both clinical and laboratory research centered on rectal cancer.  His recent work can be found in JAMA Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research and Nature Medicine.  In clinical research, he is the junior co-lead of an NIH-funded clinical trial of watch-and-wait after clinical complete response to neoadjuvant therapy for rectal cancer patients. He also investigates predictors of outcome for rectal and colon cancer patients.  He actively serves on the National Cancer Treatment Network, Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology (GI Surgery Committee) and on the National Cancer Institute’s Rectal/Anal Task Force to represent the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology.  He is also active in leadership positions on multiple national committees serving the Society of Surgical Oncology, the American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons (ASCRS) and the Association of Academic Surgeons.  Lastly, he is the Vice Chair of the Research Committee for the ASCRS Research Foundation.

In the laboratory, Dr. Smith conducts basic and translational research to develop better models to study rectal cancer, with the long-term goal of uncovering more effective treatments. Dr. Smith\’s group has developed a method of deriving 3-dimensional rectal cancer organoids (tumoroids) from biopsy samples or resected tumor. These tumoroids represent the first rectal cancer model capable of metastasis, and they reflect the corresponding patient\’s response to chemotherapy and radiation. The tumoroids therefore have the potential to accelerate research on new treatments for rectal cancer and to aid in treatment decisions for individual patients through co-clinical trials.

Christopher Sonnenday, MD, MHS
Christopher Sonnenday, M.D., M.H.S., is the Darrell A. Campbell, Jr, MD, Collegiate Professor of Transplant Surgery at the University of MIchigan, and serves as Surgical Director of Liver Transplantation for Michigan Medicine and Executive Vice-Chair of the Department of Surgery. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery, Section of Transplantation, and Associate Professor of Health Management and Policy at the School of Public Health. Dr. Sonnenday\’s clinical interests focus on liver transplantation, hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery, and general surgery procedures in patients with advanced liver disease. His primary academic and research interests include the study of frailty and sarcopenia in liver transplant candidates, novel methods of patient selection in liver transplantation and hepatobiliary surgery, and quality collaboratives in transplantation.

Mamta Swaroop, MD
Mamta Swaroop, MD, FACS is an Associate Professor of Surgery in the Division of Trauma and Critical Care Surgery and the Director for the Center for Global Surgery in the newly instated Institute for Global Health. She also serves as the Global Surgery Program Director in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. She completed her General Surgery residency at the University of South Florida in 2009 and her Surgical Critical Care Fellowship at Northwestern in 2010. Her research focus is Academic Global Surgery, including trauma education and prevention. Her global surgery lab, the Northwestern Trauma and Surgical Initiative (www.ntsi.global) aims to build sustainable access to surgical care through education and research in low resource settings, both locally and in international settings with varying levels of both healthcare infrastructure and personnel. In 2018, she was honored as one of Oprah’s Health Heroes and also received the 39th annual Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award from Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Dr. Swaroop and her lab conduct community directed research and programmatic development in Southeast Asia, South America and Chicago. Her work on helmet usage in female pillions on motorized two-wheeler added to the literature leading to legislative change in the governance of women needing to wear helmets in New Delhi, India. In Bolivia, her team wrote and continues to participate in legislation and in the implementation of a prehospital system. In Chicago, the TRUE (Trauma Responders Unify to Empower) Communities Course aims to empower communities to take action by making bystanders into immediate responders during the first few minutes after a trauma. Her team has trained over 1100 participants, nearly a third high-school student. The course is being taught in Jackson, Mississippi in partnership with the University of Mississippi Medical Center and after modification, is being taught in Bolivia. The course is undergoing revision for launch in London and Lagos through Incision, an international collaborative of Global Surgery students and trainees. She is Co-Editor of the book, Success in Academic Surgery: Academic Global Surgery and has authored numerous peer reviewed research articles and presented nationally and internationally on Trauma and Global Surgery. She has served and serves on multiple national and international leadership boards. In 2018, Dr. Swaroop presented as the Key Note Speaker at the Royal College of Surgeons Global Frontiers Conference in London on the Bolivian Trauma Initiative and also held the first international TRUE Communities Course. For the past 10 years, Dr. Swaroop has worked as a Trauma, Acute Care, and Critical Care Surgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Catherine Velopulos, MD, MHS
Catherine Garrison Velopulos, MD, MHS, FACS is a trauma, critical care, and acute care general surgeon, fellowship-trained in trauma and surgical critical care.  She completed a Masters in Health Science through the Graduate Training Program in Clinical Investigation at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with an additional certification in Health Finance and Management.  Her research interests are in violence prevention and access to surgical specialty care, using best practice models for health behavior change to address the drivers of violence and disparity, as well as to influence public policy and disseminate successful interventions within the scientific community that can be broadly implemented in the community at large.

Selwyn Vickers, MD
Dr. Vickers is Senior Vice President of Medicine and Dean of the University of Alabama School of Medicine, one of the ten largest public academic medical centers and the third largest public hospital in the USA. He is a world-renowned surgeon, pancreatic cancer researcher, and pioneer in health disparities research. His major research interests include: gene therapy as an application in the treatment of pancreatobiliary tumors, the role of growth factors and receptors in the oncogenesis of pancreatic cancer, the implications of FAS expressions and Tamoxifen in the growth and treatment of cholangiocarcinoma, assessment of clinical outcomes in the surgical treatment of pancreatobiliary tumors, and the role of death receptors in the treatment of pancreatic cancer. Dr. Vickers is a member of over 21 professional societies with leadership roles in many, including the National Academy of Medicine and the American Surgical Association. He has served as president of the Society of Black Academic Surgeons, the Southern Surgical Association, and the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract.