Surgeons’ Lives - Stuff that Matters

Dr. Gerry Fried is the former Chair of the Department of Surgery at McGill University in Montreal and is now leading the Department's initiatives in the technology and innovation space as well as surgical simulation.

In this very wide ranging interview, he touches on a whole gamut of topics ranging from the benefits of travel in terms of surgical education, having crucial conversations with badly behaved or failing colleagues, the ...

Dr. Mark Talamini leads the physician employment group in the Northwell Health system.

He spent many years in Academic Surgery rising through the ranks in Johns Hopkins before serving as Department Chair in the University of California, San Diego and then Stony Brook University before joining Northwell in 2021.

In his early career, he spent some clinical time overseas in Bangladesh and then Ireland. He was there at the very beginni...

Steve Schwaitzberg is a foregut and endocrine surgeon who is also the Chair of Surgery at the University of Buffalo in upstate New York. However, he originally wanted to be a pilot, but his eyesight wasn't good enough so somebody said you should go to medical school.

He only became interested in surgery when his original choice of internal medicine was derailed by falling out with one of his supervisors. Sometimes it is a game of c...

Dr. Mark Orloff is a professor of surgery at the University of Rochester Medical Center in upstate New York. He's been there for 34 years on Faculty and is coming up to retirement.

He was born in Germany, where his father was in the military and moved around a bit before landing in San Diego, where he spent most of his early life in a beach style community living the southern California dream. He grew up in a family of six siblings...

Dr. John Alverdy is a professor of Surgery at the University Of Chicago who is probably best known in recent years for his extraordinary work on the microbiome and how it may relate to anastomotic leaks. He is a true surgeon scientist, following a path of scientific rigor that most of us could only imagine. He has been NIH funded for a quarter of a century and despite recently retiring from operating, he continues to run his lab th...

Patrick Borgen is the Chair of the Dept of Surgery at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn New York.

He also heads-up the breast program which he has developed into the only accredited breast center in Brooklyn serving over 3 million people.

Although he was born in South Dakota on a military base, he grew up in Louisiana, where he went to medical school and did his residency before moving for a Research Fellowship to Memorial Sloa...

Professor Neil Smart is a consultant colorectal surgeon at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital in the UK.

He's best known for his clinical interests in rectal cancer, hernia prevention and treatment as well as abdominal wall reconstruction. He is one of a modern generation of clinical academics despite not working in what was traditionally considered to be the main academic centers in the big cities of the UK.

Since 2019, he has be...

Professor Oscar Traynor is currently the Director of International Surgical Training Programs at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

He was born and grew up in Dublin and having originally wanted to be an airline pilot, he found that he was unexpectedly unable to pursue this career and so entered medical school to "see what I was like". He was soon sufficiently mesmerized by Medicine to pursue a career in Surgery.

As part of ...

Dr. Pat Sylla is the current Division Chief of Colon and rental Surgery in Mount Sinai in New York.

She was born in Paris, grew up in the Ivory Coast in West Africa, and went to college and medical school in the US. She also completed her residency and fellowships in colorectal surgery and minimally invasive surgery.

She's probably best known as one of the great innovators in surgical technique, including TaTME which she developed ...

In this latest episode of Surgeons Lives, Steve Stain recalls his journey from infancy in San Antonio, Texas, to growing up near Fresno in California and entering College and Medical School.

He certainly started with the basics, draining pus for his boss in a drug abuse practice. He describes being supported by some outstanding mentors in his early residency and guided into a career in Academic Surgery that proved extremely succe...

David Linehan MD is the current Dean and CEO of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and the Medical Center.

He grew up in Boston having lost his father as a toddler. Despite living in the tough streets of Dorchester - Whitey Bulger and all that stuff - he learned that education and hard work would lead him to a better life.

Academic achievement took him through College and the Medical School necessary to become a surgeon...

Latest episode of #Surgeonslives #Stuffthatmatters has landed with an interview with another surgeon from the UK

Gill Tierney is a force of nature. A general and colorectal surgeon who works in the midlands of the UK she rose to become the second woman elected President of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland.

By her own admission she has never been afraid to speak out and is generally a chatty person - but on...

Nat Soper is one of the best known laparoscopic surgeons worldwide. He was there at the very beginning and was definitely one of the true innovators in laparoscopic, minimally invasive, natural orifice surgery.

He is currently the Chair of Surgery at Banner health in Phoenix, but that was never his intention!

He describes in this interview, a stellar career culminating in being Division Chief at Northwestern in Chicago, where he wa...

Tom Watson is a thoracic surgeon of excellence and works at Corewell Health in Michigan.

A Midwestern boy by background he became part of the USC esophageal gang under the mentorship of Tom DeMeester.

He then spent 20 years at the University of Rochester where he rose through the ranks to become Professor of Surgery and then in 2016 moved to become a system chair at MedStar in Washington DC.

That wasn't an entirely happy experience...

Phil Schauer is one of the nations best known bariatric surgeons.

He spent many years and rose to fame in the world of metabolic surgery when in the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio before recently moving to Louisiana and the Pennington Research Institute where he continues to make a difference to patients with morbid obesity and metabolic syndrome.

In this discussion, he describes how Bariatric Surgery was the redheaded stepchild of Surge...

Tom Varghese, MD,  is the chief of the section of Thoracic Surgery at the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Utah. He's also many other things, including the president of the Society of University Surgeons and one of the founders of the Strong for Surgery program in the American College of Surgeons.

He's been NIH funded for quite some time now and is heavily focused in the areas of quality and integrated care. However, he is very much mo...

Scott Silvestry MD is the current Division chief of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

But he is so much more than that.

He was drawn to Medicine and Surgery by family tragedy, leaving the close community of the Bronx to become a doctor. He spent his formative residence years in Duke, or he had the opportunity to learn much – not all good – from the legendary Dr. David Sabiston.

After residency, a period ...

Mary Hawn is the Chair of Surgery at Stanford and a highly successful academic general surgeon. For her, life started on the shores of Lake Michigan but after medical school she spent time in Oregon doing a fellowship before joining the UAB faculty in Birmingham. She spent 14 years there rising to become Division of General Surgery.

Along the way she married Eben Rosenthal, a high flying academic Head and Neck surgeon and they rais...

Nick Stafford OBE retired a few years ago as Professor of Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Hull in the UK.

However, there is way more to Nick that his surgical achievements. As Co-founder of the Daisy Appeal Charity his leadership raised many, many millions and the creation of a unique PET scanning center in Hull - achievements acknowledged by the award of the OBE.

He is a serial classic car enthusiast owning more than 50...