This fall, as we welcome new PGY1 residents and a host of new faculty members, there is great excitement here in the Department of Surgery.

On the clinical front, we have gained additional work at the Methodist Hospital, have grown the Heart Transplant and Advanced Heart Failure Program, have seen an upswing in liver transplants, and are now the busiest hospital by surgical volume for pancreas resections in the tri-state area!

On the quality front, Dr. Herbert Cohn and Randi Altmark, RN, BSN, CNOR have done a tremendous job with the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program. Using those data we have organized the Surgical Care Committee and new Surgical Care Bundle and are driving changes in practice, and hopefully, better outcomes.

On the research front, our grant submissions have doubled in the last three years. Total grant awards for the last fiscal year approached $2 million. We have completed a large prospective randomized trial looking at pancreaticojejunostomy following the Whipple procedure, and have clinical trials open in the Divisions of Vascular, Cardiac, Transplant and General Surgery.

On the education front, Dr. Karen Chojnacki has done a great job retooling our surgical curriculum with the help of Drs. Niels Martin and Vincent Armenti, and the Chief Residents.

Finally, we thank Lara Allan Goldstein for her work in greatly increasing the department's development dollars - most recently accepting a generous gift from the Nicoletti family to support an endowed professorship in transplant surgery.