Episode 4: USA vs. UK: ASGBI: Conferences

• Surgical conferences are a forum of the profession–where we all gather to socialize, share clinical experiences, promote academic work, and learn from each other. But what goes into putting these conferences together? In this next installment of the BTK/ASGBI collaborative series, Jon Williams and ASGBI co-hosts Kellie Bateman and Jared Wohlgemut welcome Mr. Dimitrios Damaskos from Edinburgh and Dr. Anne Lidor from the University of Wisconsin to take a look behind the scenes of conference planning. We’ll cover logistics, program selection, how surgical societies strive to support their members and trainees, and much more!
  
  
• Mr Dimitrios Damaskos, initially from Greece, he came to the UK for his fellowship and is a UGI and Emergency General Surgical Consultant with an interest in abdominal wall surgery based in The Royal Infirmary Edinburgh. He is the current Director of Scientific Programme for ASGBI and responsible for organising our main International Congress which this year happens to be in Edinburgh. He has also held numerous other events for surgical societies including the British Hernia Society.
  
  
• Lidor serves as the program chair for the Society for American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (i.e. SAGES), which is a wide-reaching US-based international surgical society that encompasses many facets of general surgery. The SAGES Annual Meeting was just last month, and is a great opportunity for surgeons to convene and share clinical experiences, academic work, and professionally connect. Dr. Lidor completed medical school at the New York Medical College, and then moved on to George Washington University for general surgery residency training. Following residency, she moved to Baltimore to Johns Hopkins where she completed her MIS/Bariatric Surgery fellowship and subsequently stayed on as a faculty surgeon. After years at Hopkins during which she held many education leadership roles both at the medical school and as fellowship director, she moved to the University of Wisconsin to become Chief of Minimally Invasive and Bariatric Surgery, a role she continues to hold today.