The Auxiliary to Texas Children’s Hospital recently awarded Dr. Chester Koh and Dr. Robert Williamson with $75,000 research awards.
Koh, a pediatric urologist at Texas Children’s and the director of the organization’s Robotic Surgery Program, earned the Denton A. Cooley Fellowship in Surgical Innovation Award, which is given to a physician whose surgical research focuses on innovative ways to help children and to save lives. Williamson, an otolaryngologist with Texas Children’s and a professor with Baylor College of Medicine, received the Outcomes Fellowship Award, which supports patient care, education and research.
Koh is an internationally recognized expert in minimally invasive surgery, and has been instrumental in developing minimally invasive techniques with both laparoscopic surgery and da Vinci® robotic surgery to treat children. The hospital’s program serves as a pediatric robotic surgery research and training center that collaborates with other institutions in the Texas Medical Center.
Williamson studies functional outcomes of cochlear implants and the effects of language spoken by the implant team and by the family of the child who receives the implant. Little data is available on outcomes in implant recipients where the native language spoken in the home is different from that spoken by members of the cochlear implant team.
Williamson’s study will retrospectively analyze and compare cochlear implant recipients from non-native English-speaking households to recipients from English-speaking households, and analyze outcomes from patients with similar clinical characteristics.