SAGES Member Spotlight

 

“I love that SAGES played and continues to play a significant role in establishing the standards around quality and safety with all things minimally invasive. Because of this, there is a certain humility and adventure around the work of SAGES. While never cavalier or cowboyish, it’s always forward thinking and unassuming. This lack of fear around intellectual curiosity and change ensures that we will always be learning and will always be made humble.”

Looking back on her years as a resident at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, Dr. Nia Zalamea wanted to be well-prepared when she went into private practice. This is one of the reasons she took the advice of Dr. David Thoman to join SAGES and take advantage of the society’s many educational resources.

Dr. Zalamea says, “When I went straight into private practice, attending SAGES meetings became even more important as I was no longer in academics but wanted to make sure that I continued to learn about new techniques and hone my laparoscopy skills.”

Now back in academics, Dr. Zalamea is founder and director of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) Global Surgery Institute and Associate Director for the UTHSC Center for Multicultural and Global Health. She is also Vice President and board chair for Memphis Mission of Mercy, an NGO focused on service to the poor via quality medical and surgical care. For Dr. Zalamea surgical mission work has been her family’s work since 1999. https://styleblueprint.com/memphis/everyday/how-this-general-surgeon-her-family-serve-memphis-and-beyond

As an active member of SAGES Global Affairs committee, she shares that same focus on the underserved.

“I believe laparoscopy should be promoted and used worldwide, and it’s important to engage with surgeons, providing tools and training in their own communities. But having been in private practice when my surgical care put my patient’s family into bankruptcy because of their lack of insurance, and their inability to pay their hospital bills, our job is never done until access to affordable minimally invasive surgery is obtained across the world.

My hope is that combining my interest in minimally invasive surgery, access to care, and work with the underserved, we’ll able to discover ways to make the procedures that we do more affordable, accessible, safe and with outcomes that allow people to get back on their feet again regardless of their socioeconomic status. I fundamentally believe that the poor pay more not only in terms of quality of care, but cost of care and for this reason we must focus on them and their outcomes and their costs in order to improve care across the board.”

Outside of being a surgeon, her mission work and SAGES, Dr. Zalamea is married to a photographer, mom to two young boys, and loves music, literature and stand up paddleboarding. “This balance,” she says, “saves me every day.”

“Work hard, play hard—SAGES definitely gets that right!,” says Dr. Tiffany Cox, the latter referring to the annual meeting and sing-off, of course. But she adds, “the availability of experts who speak at SAGES and then make themselves easily accessible and available for one-on-one mentorship is the heartbeat of the society. There is also ample opportunity for leadership and advocating to mold young, eager surgeons into the surgical leaders of tomorrow.”

Dr. Cox is currently deployed in Italy with the U.S. Navy at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Naples with her husband and three young children.  She is loving the experience and opportunity to embrace a new culture as she serves her country and travels with her family while honing her yoga skills.

Even with her deployments, Dr. Cox has managed to stay extremely active on several SAGES committees. This includes teaching many of the fellow robotics courses as a member of the Robotics Committee, previously served on the Teleproctoring/Telementoring Task Force, and continued engagement as a member of the Military Committee advocating for active duty military members in SAGES and collaborating on practice patterns to streamline MIS approaches and care throughout the DOD.

Dr. Cox first joined SAGES as a resident and Candidate member in 2009, encouraged by one of her early SAGES mentors, Dr. E. Matt Ritter. At the time, she was working on patient-centered clinical outcomes research with MIS mentors and was accepted for a podium presentation at the SAGES meeting in Phoenix that year. Her later work in the simulation lab under his guidance resulted in creation of a physical platform endoscopy trainer-now called ETS-now used by many GME programs to proficiency train their residents to pass certification for FES.

It was also during these cultivating years that she heard Dr. B.Todd Heniford as a guest speaker at a SAGES conference. It was clear she knew she wanted to train under his operative mentorship to bring back to the military a skillset that would be cutting edge in abdominal wall reconstruction and revisional foregut surgery.

Of SAGES overall, she adds, “I have admired and worked to emulate the networking opportunities that the more experienced and true leaders of SAGES fully embrace.  As a resident, many societies can easily dismiss or underappreciate the resident/candidate members of the society.  SAGES has never been that way.  They engage you at all levels and introduce you to mentors early on in your career.”

Dr. Cox plans to be a lifelong SAGES member, furthering her skills training and collaboration to not just  further SAGES interests, but to bring about a unified mindset of best practices and standardized training across societies.

“Once out of the Navy, I plan to continue my surgical teaching career into developing countries to train their future surgeons skills that can meet their needs for advancement of surgical medicine globally.”

 

 

Many members regularly refer to SAGES as family. For Dr. James “Butch” Rosser, SAGES is the “Jedi Club” for cutting edge laparoscopic surgeons.

Since joining SAGES in the early 90s as a young attending surgeon in Ohio, Dr. Rosser’s ongoing participation has elevated him to Jedi Master status. His interest and focus on technology, innovation and education has kept him involved in a number of committees as well as the SAGES board and annual meeting.

He’s been active creating training videos (eg. laparoscopic cholecystectomy) for the meeting’s Learning Center and, for the last decade, has been the chair and face of the meeting’s annual Mini Med School for local high school students. Dr. Rosser calls the immersive and interactive experience great exposure and one of the best ways to promote a surgical career.

Like Mini Med School, Dr. Rosser says memorable SAGES experiences tend to repeat themselves with each annual meeting. He does highlight his Gerald Marks lecture in Philadelphia in 2008 as one of his most memorable experiences. In that talk—that you can watch here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3vVYsEP74I–Dr. Rosser talks about the importance of a life of service after a near-fatal car accident. During his many years as a SAGES member, he also counts many mentors “who’ve gone on to do great things,” including Drs. Steve Schwaitzberg, Desmond Birkett and Dan Jones.

Outside of SAGES and surgery, Dr. Rosser wears many more hats as an inventor, futurist, social advocate, actor, playwright, video gamer, comic book collector, author and television personality. In fact, When Dr. Rosser says he’s “been in the media for quite some time,” that’s an understatement. The cliff notes of his media resume include more than 350 invited lectures around the world, more than 60 peer-reviewed articles, 16 book chapters, TED talks, appearances on most major TV networks and an Emmy nomination in 2013 for the Dr. Oz show on the Atlanta Heartburn Clinic.

It also includes more than 16 documentaries, including most recently—and most personally—Dr. Rosser’s documentary on the Mediflix streaming service, “More Than What We See, An Obesity Journey.” The two-part film, which you can watch at http://www.mediflix.com/video/obesity-part1?utm_source=Members%20Spotlight&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=SAGES shows Dr. Rosser’s triumph over losing  weight and his wife Dana’s challenges along his journey. You can also watch the Rosser’s appearance on the Today show earlier this year here: https://www.today.com/video/couple-shares-toll-obesity-takes-on-relationships-131828805754

As Dr. Rosser and Dana continue to promote the documentary, you can expect Dr. Rosser to remain a fixture at future SAGES meetings as his “love affair” with SAGES continues.

 

 

 

 

What makes SAGES unique? For Dr. Susanne Warner, the society’s ability to be relevant to a large swath of members serving many different types of institutions and patients. She says, “With regular focus on clinical excellence and emphasis on providing video evidence of what we say we can do, SAGES challenges each of us to level up.”

Dr. Warner, who initially joined SAGES as a first-year faculty member, continues to level up her own involvement, first as a member of the SAGES Research & Career Development Committee and today as part of the of the HPB Task Force, where she has helped create the Mastery curriculum for minimally invasive liver surgery.

While she considers the entire SAGES video library and Facebook collaborative to be “one big peer mentor,” she also names a long list of SAGES leaders who have directly impacted her career: Drs. Tonia Young-Fadok (“she showed me how elegant laparoscopy following avascular planes can keep an operation simple and safe”); Adnan Alseidi and Rohan Jeyarajah (“two of the first to welcome me to a national HPB surgery meeting”); Mike Kendrick and Melissa Hogg (“both have shown me and our entire field what’s possible for MIS pancreas surgery”); and, Sean Cleary (“he inspires me with his skill as a laparoscopic liver surgeon, and as a bonus, he and Adnan have inspired me to spare spleens!”), and last but never least, Dr. Yuman Fong (“a longtime mentor and sponsor, who inspires robotic liver surgery around the globe!”).

“I have also enjoyed peer-mentorship from SAGES luminaries like Drs. Dana Telem, Kevin El-Hayek, Iswanto Sucandy, and Subhashini Ayloo. Small interactions with each of them have had big impact on everything from the way I moderate a webinar to tips and tricks in MIS and hernia cases.”

Dr. Warner says that her most memorable experience as a SAGES member was being asked to give a talk about robotic pancreas surgery immediately following a talk advocating for laparoscopic surgery by Dr. Kendrick, calling it “an amazing opportunity to exchange ideas early in my career with figure heads in the field.”

She adds that the approachability of senior surgeons at the annual meeting is one of the best things about SAGES.  “The intentionally inclusive sessions ensure that everyone is welcome and everyone can take something valuable back to their practice. I hope to continue learning from my colleagues and making patient care better, safer, and less invasive for all of our patients.”

Outside of SAGES, Dr. Warner cherishes family time (especially baking), camping, and travel with her kids and husband. A peloton enthusiast, she’s also a self-described “intermittently avid runner” – adding that she might be able to exercise less if she didn’t bake so much!

 

As a research fellow at the Steinberg-Bernstein Centre for Minimally Invasive Surgery in Montreal in 2015, Dr. Nicolò Pecorelli remembers that the SAGES annual meeting was THE surgical event. And when he attended his first meeting in Nashville that year, he says, “I was surprised how different it was from any other scientific meetings I’d been to. Students, residents, fellows were all very much involved and included. SAGES has always been about inclusion, diversity, supporting innovation and the younger generations of surgeons and trainees.”

Dr. Pecorelli is back in Milan after completing his fellowship training at McGill in 2018 under former SAGES president Dr. Gerald Fried and current president Dr. Liane Feldman. He’s become a very involved international member, active on both the HPB task force and SAGES HPB Masters Program Facebook page, and the Surgical Oncology committee – all of which he finds exciting even if the time difference means attending late night calls in the kitchen to avoid waking his family!

Praising Dr. Fried’s “positive vibe in the OR” and Dr. Feldman as a “brilliant surgeon and force of nature,” Dr. Pecorelli also counts a number of other SAGES members as mentors: Drs. Adnan Alseidi, Kevin El-Hayek and Melissa Hogg and Dr. Melina Vassiliou as a “fun and patient educator” who pushed him to learn upper GI endoscopy.

In addition to his committee work, Dr. Pecorelli was a co-principal investigator in a research project focusing on the development of a mobile device app for patients recovering from bowel surgery that got funded by the SAGES SMART grant in 2015-2016. He also received the Best International Abstract award at the 2016 Annual Meeting in Boston.

Dr. Pecorelli, who is working to recruit more Italian and European surgeons into SAGES, has also gotten students and residents in his institution involved. Last year, one of his students won the SAGES Medical Student Summer award and spent the summer working on her project in his clinical research lab. As he points out, “Few societies offer such a variety of opportunities.”

Having missed last year’s meeting because of COVID restrictions, Dr. Pecorelli is looking forward to joining colleagues in Denver, where he likely won’t have time for his favorite hobby: skiing!