Surgeons’ Lives - Stuff that Matters

Rowan Parks was born into surgery in Belfast, where his father George was a Colorectal Surgeon who became President of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

Growing up amidst the troubles in Belfast he decided to pursue a medical career and was accepted to his first choice of Queens University Belfast. A pretty standard training pathway followed but took an unexpected turn when he decided to spend a time in the HPB unit at Edin...

The latest episode of #Surgeonslives #stuffthatmatters is out now with valentine who talks us through a life journey from Cameroon to Chair! To describe Val Nfonsam as an over achiever would be too easy because he is much more than that. He is currently the Chair of Surgery at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia having moved there from a 2-year stint as Chair of Surgery in LSA, Louisiana.

However, when he was in schoo...

This is a very special episode of #Surgeonslives #Stuffthatmatters

Matt Albert is one of the best known colorectal surgeons worldwide. A florida boy through and through he truly hit the big time with TAMIS which he co-invented but popularized around the world.

Always moving at maximum speed in everything he does he is a truly accomplished technical surgeon, a gifted teacher and a powerhouse of an intellect. I think he probably qual...

In the latest episode of #Surgeonslives #stuffthatmatters we meet Dr Mark Evers.

He is a surgical oncologist and cancer researcher who is the head of the Markey cancer center at the University of Kentucky? In the years he has been at the helm of the cancer center, he has led it to NCI Cancer Center designation in 2013 and ultimately Comprehensive Cancer Center designation 10 years later.

Mark grew up in the smallest of small town...

Ashok Pathak from Hull in the UK, recently retired after a wonderful career as an Orthopedic Surgeon and leader in the creation of a career pathway for the Associate Specialty grade trainees.

Born and educated in India where his father was a chest physician and a man who taught the values of giving back to those in need. The family established a hospital to treat Tuberculosis - almost endemic in the early 1950's - and it grew to 15...

Matt Weiss is the deputy physician in Chief and Director of Surgical Oncology at Northwell Health Cancer Institute. He is an internationally recognized surgical oncologist with a special interest in pancreatic cancer and particularly interested in outcomes and matters of quality.

His early career followed a very traditional academic pathway culminating in a long period on Faculty at Hopkins where his senior mentor was Dr. John Came...

Samir Pathak is an HPB surgeon from Leeds in the UK. The family business has been medicine for several generations, but he has also been brought up immersed in the Indian culture of cricket - and in his family's case charity.

n this truly fascinating interview, he discusses his early surgical career and training. This was impacted by having undergo multiple operations before the age of 10. He also describes another family passion w...

Dr. Sherry Wren is a Professor of of Surgery at Stanford in California but in this interview with Surgeons Lives it's evident that she is a lot more than that.

An early career was spent chasing the academic pinnacle of being a Department Chair, but after a number of years of always being the bridesmaid and never the bride, she experienced an epiphany that made her realize that this was no longer the most important thing to her in l...

Latest episode of #surgeonslives #stuffthatmatters Agree with him or not, it cannot be denied that Lord Ara Darzi has definitely seen under the hood at the inner working of central government when it comes to setting policy and the delivery of healthcare within the UK. In this - the second episode with Ara - he describes how he came to become part of Government for two years, taking him away from a spectacular career as an academi...

This is the first of two episodes during which I have the chance to interview Professor Ara Darzi - or Lord Darzi as he became when he entered the House of Lords in 2007.

Ara Darzi was born in Baghdad to Armenian parents and after high school education entered medical school in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in Dublin. After graduation and surgical training in Ireland, including a research fellowship, he moved to London s...

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 ...