SPEAKER BIOS
Jaap Bonjer, MD, PhD, FRCSC, FACS, FASCRS
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Dr. Jaap Bonjer is Professor and Chair of the Department of Surgery at the Amsterdam University Medical Center, the Netherlands. He is the founder and CEO of the Amsterdam Skills Centre for Health Sciences (ASC), a 17 OR stations facility.
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In 2022, Dr. Bonjer initiated DUTCH (Digital United Training Concepts for Healthcare), a national project in conjunction with educational technology partners to transform the training of allied health care professionals by substituting 50 % of workplace training by digital learning and virtual or physical simulation. The project has been awarded €132m by the Dutch National Growth Fund.
Julie Cornish, MBBCh, MD, FRCS
Mrs Julie Cornish is a consultant colorectal surgeon and senior lecturer in Cardiff, with a subspecialty interest in pelvic health. She trained in Wales and London, with an MD from Imperial College and a pelvic floor fellowship in Oxford. She is the Secretary for the Pelvic Floor Society. Her research interests focus on outcomes after surgery, in particular bowel dysfunction after surgery and outcomes after emergency laparotomy. She has more than 70 publications and regularly presents internationally and nationally. She was a co-investigator for the HART trial and is the chief investigator in several studies, most recently POLARiS and POLO.
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Michael Rosen, MD
Michael J. Rosen is a Professor of Surgery at Lerner College of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland Ohio. He currently serves as the Director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Abdominal Core Health and is the Director of Surgical Operations for the Digestive Disease Institute. He has been awarded 22 funded research grants, published over 250 peer reviewed papers in minimally invasive surgery and complex abdominal wall reconstruction. He has authored over 50 chapters in various surgical textbooks. He has edited 5 surgical textbooks, including the Atlas of Abdominal Wall Reconstruction. He received his medical training at University of Southern California. His surgical residency was completed at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He also completed a research fellowship in minimally invasive surgery at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and performed a clinical fellowship at the Carolinas Medical Center, in Charlotte North Carolina. He is the co-founder and Medical Director of the Americas Hernia Society Quality Collaborative.
Selwyn Rogers, Jr., MD, MPH, FACS
Selwyn Rogers, Jr., MD, MPH, FACS, was named the Section Chief of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery at the University of Chicago Medicine in January 2017. He now serves as the Dr. James E. Bowman, Jr. Professor in the Biological Sciences at The University of Chicago Medicine. Dr. Rogers is an acclaimed trauma and critical care surgeon and public health expert who has served in leadership capacities at health centers across the country. His work seeks to improve quality and access to care for all patients and advocate for treating intentional violence as a public health problem.
Desmond, D'Souza, MD, FACS
Desmond M. D’Souza, MD, FACS is a board-certified general thoracic surgeon at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and James Cancer Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He is an Associate Professor in the Division of Thoracic Surgery in The Department of Surgery. After completing his general surgery training at Yale New Haven Hospital – Saint Raphael he finished a general thoracic track fellowship at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic.
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Dr. D’Souza’s practice includes the multi-disciplinary management of benign and malignant diseases of the lung, esophagus, mediastinum, chest wall, trachea, and diaphragm. He is an internationally recognized expert on robotic thoracic surgery, key opinion leader, proctor, and hosts surgeons from across the world as a Case Observation site at The Ohio State University. His clinical practice focuses on enhancing patient outcomes by delivering high quality minimally invasive robotic thoracic surgery. He is an expert on robotic lobectomy, segmentectomy and robotic assisted minimally invasive esophagectomy (RAMIE).
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A well published investigator, Dr. D’Souza has presented his research work at numerous national and international meetings including the American Association of Thoracic Surgery (AATS), Society of Thoracic Surgery (STS), American College of Surgeons (ACS), and the Society of Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES). Dr. D’Souza’s research focuses on thoracic oncology clinical trials, health services research involving robotic thoracic surgery and improving the quality of patient care. Dr. D’Souza’s passion for surgical innovation has led to patents in robotic surgery and extramural funding through the National Science Foundation. A fervent educator, he is involved with educating medical students, residents, thoracic surgery fellows and surgeons. He has proctored and taught robotic thoracic surgery across the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Eric Vallières, MD, FRCSC
Vallières heads the Division of Thoracic Surgery at Swedish Cancer Institute in Seattle since 2004. He received his MD at Laval and following an internship in Québec, trained in General then Thoracic Surgery at the U of Toronto. He joined the faculty at the U of Alberta Edmonton in 1991, then the U of Ottawa in 1994. He was recruited at the U of Washington Seattle in 1996 where he remained as an Associate Professor until 2004. He was vice-chairman of the SWOG Lung Committee and a member of the IASLC Staging Committee. His main interests are perioperative systemic therapy and lung cancer surgery.