Top Surgery News
Uncovering why many veterans with PAD in the South experience amputations
The overlapping populations of Americans with peripheral artery disease (PAD) that commonly experience worse outcomes include veterans, African Americans, and people who live in underserved and/or disadvantaged communities. With the support of a Veterans Administration DEI Research Supplement award, Olamide Alabi, MD, aims to focus on the South in examining access to care among veterans with PAD, investigating care variations that lead to potentially preventable lower extremity amputation, and devising solutions to improve the quality of care provided to these veterans.
Also in the News:
Onkhar Khullar and Manu Sancheti perform Georgia’s first robotic-assisted tracheobronchoplasty
Keneeshia Williams' drive to educate: ACS CASEL program, TEDx presenter
Marty Sellers named medical advisor-elect to the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations
Faculty Spotlights
Jazmín M. Cole, MD
Dr. Cole received her medical degree at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. She completed here general surgery residency at Houston Methodist Hospital, and her advanced gastrointestinal/minimally invasive surgery/flexible endoscopy surgery fellowship at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center.
Her foremost clinical specialties are abdominal wall reconstruction, hernia repair, foregut surgery, and advanced surgical endoscopy. She is also interested in the study of implicit bias in healthcare.
Felipe Maegawa, MD, MS
Dr. Maegawa specializes in general and hepatopancreatobiliary surgery, particularly robotic approaches for these types of procedures. He is an award-winning educator of technical skills in the operating room for both medical students and surgical residents.
Prior to joining Emory, he was an associate professor of surgery at the Department of Surgery of the University of Arizona; clinical director of general surgery for the Southern Arizona VA Health Care System; and site director for the general surgery residency training program at the Southern Arizona VA.
Trainee Spotlights
R. Anthony Meena receives second GVS Robert B. Smith, III, MD, Resident Award
Vascular surgery resident R. Anthony Meena, MD, received his second Robert B. Smith, III, MD, Resident Award at the Georgia Vascular Society's 2021 Scientific Sessions.
His top abstract described the formation of a multidisciplinary telehealth program at the Atlanta VA Healthcare System to treat patients with chronic limb-threatening ischemia (CLTI) during the beginning of the pandemic as a means of keeping amputation rates from rising. After seven months, the study found that amputation rates and advanced disease presentation for patients with CLTI remained stable.
Kirsten Baecher selected for SESC Gold Medal Resident Paper Award
Kirsten Baecher, MD, is in the second year of her research sabbatical under the mentorship of Michael Lowe, MD, MA, and Mandy Ford, PhD.
In her winning paper, Dr. Baecher and her collaborators investigated whether survival outcomes of patients with head and neck (H&N) melanoma were comparable to those of patients with other melanomas. They observed no significant difference in melanoma-specific survival, distant-metastasis free survival, or overall survival between H&N melanoma and melanomas of other sites.
