More than 300 members of the Texas Children’s Hospital Department of Surgery attended the sixth annual Edmond T. Gonzales, Jr., Surgical Research Day on May 6. The event provided a forum for researchers across the department to showcase their work.
“I really look forward to this day every year where we get a chance to highlight some of the important research being conducted in the department,” said Dr. Charles D. Fraser, Jr., surgeon-in-chief at Texas Children’s Hospital. “Creating new knowledge is central to our core values as academic surgeons at Texas Children’s Hospital.”
This year 122 abstracts were submitted for review. Eleven of these abstracts were chosen for oral presentations on Surgical Research Day and 111 were accepted for poster presentations. This year eight students vied for the Best Presentation award and three faculty members were chosen to present their research.
The 2016 keynote speaker was Dr. Rebecca Richards-Kortum from Rice University. She is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor, a professor of Bioengineering and a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Richards-Kortum is also director of two institutes – Rice 360° Institute for Global Health and the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering – and the founder of Beyond Traditional Borders. She spoke about “Technologies to Improve Pediatric and Surgical Care in Low-Resource Settings.”
Payal Cramer, a health care attorney from Baker Hostetler, LLP gave an ethics presentation on “Patient Privacy and Research” specifically discussing extracting research from electronic medical records.
Awards presented at the event were the Samuel Stal Research Award for outstanding research by a resident or fellow, the Research Mentor Award, and Best Oral Presentation and Best Poster Presentation.
The Samuel Stal Research Award was presented to pediatric and adolescent gynecology fellow Dr. Julie Hakim for her work in pediatric device development. The award is named after Dr. Samuel Stal, former chief of Plastic Surgery at Texas Children’s.
Dr. Jed Nuchtern, chief of Pediatric Surgery, was honored with the Research Mentor Award. The award is given on an annual basis to honor a Department of Surgery faculty member who serves as a research mentor through career development, professional guidance or cultivation of research interests.
Dr. Yangyang Yu, a researcher in Pediatric Surgery, received the Best Oral Presentation award for her presentation on “Time-Driven, Activity-Based Costing to Identify Opportunities for Cost Reduction in Pediatric Appendectomy.”
Best Poster award was given to Chi-Han Lu from Pediatric Surgery for his work “Pseudotyped AAV Vector-Mediated Gene Transfer in a Human Fetal Trachea Xenograft Model: Implications for In Utero Gene Therapy for Cystic Fibrosis.”
The Surgical Research Day Planning Committee included Dr. Jed Nuchtern (chair), Melinda Mathis (co-chair), Dr. Swathi Balaji, Dr. Jennifer Dietrich, Dr. Chester Koh, Dr. Lingkun Kong, Dr. Sandi Lam, Dr. Liz McCullum, Dr. Scott Rosenfeld, Kathy Carberry, RN, Matthew Girotto, Angie Rangel, Veronica Victorian, Anissa Quiroz, Stacey Staples, Shon Bower and Laura Higgins.
