GLOBAL SURGERY RESEARCH SEMINAR

The PGSSC Global Surgery Research Seminar is a public seminar series that aims to share methods and results across a broader surgery research community. Over the course of ten seminars, our goal is to strengthen general knowledge and specific skills by learning from the experience of our seminar speakers.

The Research Seminar will be held the second Tuesday of each month, from 9:00 a.m. EST to 10:00 a.m EST.

For each Research Seminar session, we identify a common theme and similar methods. Each speaker will present for 20-25 minutes, followed by a 30-minute open discussion on the topic. All are welcome; specific details and registration links for sessions are available for each individual session.

Videos of this year's past research seminar sessions and research seminar sessions from 2021-2022 are made available online if you are not able to join us live.

2022-2023 RESEARCH SEMINAR SERIES

September 8: Multi-site randomized trials in global surgery, with Han-Kwang Yang and Adesoji Ademuyiwa
October: No research seminar
November 10: Access to blood for global surgery, with Marie Paul Nisingizwe and Meghan Delaney
December 8: Gender disparities in global surgery: disparities amongst students and providers, with Grace Kansayisa and Doris Sarmiento
January 12: Task sharing in global surgery, with Tigistu Ashengo and Jessica Passman
February 9: Cost-effectiveness in global surgery, with Sergio Torres-Rueda and Andy Healy
March 9: Global Surgery Systems Readiness, with Albino Kalolo and Katherine Iverson
May 11: Health equity through action on social determinants of health, with Michael Marmot and Michaela Hyrie
June 1: Digital Technology in Global Surgery with Stephen Knight and Theoneste Nkurunziza

MAY 11, 2023

This seminar will focus on social determinants of health. The featured speakers will dive into their experiences conducting research focused on social, institutional, and policy interventions that can improve the health of vulnerable populations by addressing structural and social contexts.

- Registration Required. Please click here to register.

If you cannot join us for this live session, we welcome you to watch a recording, which will be available here.

HEALTH EQUITY THROUGH THE SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH

Professor Sir Michael G. Marmot MBBS, MPH, PhD, FRCP, FFPHM, FMedSci, FBA Director of the Institute of Health Equity (UCL Department of Epidemiology & Public Health)

Sir Michael Marmot has been Professor of Epidemiology at University College London since 1985. He is the author of The Health Gap: the challenge of an unequal world (Bloomsbury: 2015), and Status Syndrome: how your place on the social gradient directly affects your health (Bloomsbury: 2004). Professor Marmot is the Advisor to the WHO Director-General, on social determinants of health, in the new WHO Division of Healthier Populations; Distinguished Visiting Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong (2019-), and co-Director of the of the CUHK Institute of Health Equity. He is the recipient of the WHO Global Hero Award; the Harvard Lown Professorship (2014-2017); the Prince Mahidol Award for Public Health (2015), and 19 honorary doctorates. Marmot has led research groups on health inequalities for nearly 50 years. He chaired the Commission on Equity and Health Inequalities in the Americas, set up in 2015 by the World Health Organization’s Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO/ WHO) and chaired the Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), which was set up by the World Health Organization in 2005, and produced the report entitled: ‘Closing the Gap in a Generation’ in August 2008. At the request of the British Government, he conducted the Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England post 2010, which published its report 'Fair Society, Healthy Lives' in February 2010. This was followed by the European Review of Social Determinants of Health and the Health Divide, for WHO EURO in 2014; Health Equity in England: Marmot Review 10 Years On, in 2020; Build Back Fairer: the COVID-19 Marmot Review in 2021; and the Report of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, for WHO EMRO, also in 2021.
Professor Marmot also chaired the Expert Panel for the WCRF/AICR 2007 Second Expert Report on Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective; the Breast Screening Review for the NHS National Cancer Action Team, and was a member of The Lancet-University of Oslo Commission on Global Governance for Health. Early in his career, he set up and led a number of longitudinal cohort studies on the social gradient in health in the UCL Department of Epidemiology & Public Health (where he was head of department for 25 years): the Whitehall II Studies of British Civil Servants, investigating explanations for the striking inverse social gradient in morbidity and mortality; the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), and several international research efforts on the social determinants of health. He served as President of the British Medical Association (BMA) in 2010-2011, and as President of the World Medical Association in 2015. He is President of the British Lung Foundation. He is an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology; a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences; an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health of the Royal College of Physicians. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution for six years and in 2000 he was knighted by Her Majesty The Queen, for services to epidemiology and the understanding of health inequalities. Professor Marmot is a Member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Michaela Hynie, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Psychology, York University

Michaela Hynie, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, the Interim Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University and an Honorary Professor in the College of Medicine at the University of Rwanda. Dr. Hynie collaborates with communities, community-serving agencies and activist groups on the development and evaluation of social, institutional and policy interventions that can improve health, mental health and well-being by addressing structural and social exclusion. Her work has primarily been situated in Canada and Rwanda, but also the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Liberia, Nepal, Sierra Leone and South Africa. Dr. Hynie is the past president of the Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies.

JUNE 1, 2023

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN GLOBAL SURGERY

This seminar will focus on readiness assessments for global surgery. The featured speakers will dive into their experiences conducting research focused on the creation and implementation of readiness assessment tools across varied settings.

- Registration Required. Please click here to register.

If you cannot join us for this live session, we welcome you to watch a recording, which will be available here.

Stephen R Knight, BSc, MBChB, MRCS, PhD

Centre of Medical Informatics, Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh
Renal Transplant Unit, Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, Glasgow

Stephen is a NIHR Clinical Research Fellow and surgical registrar in the West of Scotland. Interests include crowd-sourcing patient-level data, machine learning techniques, mobile data collection platforms and wearable technology to measure postoperative surgical outcomes.

During his PhD exploring global surgical outcomes, he helped lead GlobalSurg 3, a prospective international cohort study of early cancer outcomes of 15 000 patients across 82 countries. In addition, during the Covid-19 pandemic his work developing risk stratification scores to guide clinical management was published in the British Medical Journal and incorporated within UK national guidelines. The impact of his PhD research was recently acknowledged by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh through the award of the Syme Medal.

Theoneste Nkurunziza, PhD Candidate

Technical University of Munich, Germany

Mr Nkurunziza is a Global Health Professional and Researcher who is well published in high impact journals. He served as the Right to Healthcare Program Manager and Health Research Manager at Partners in Health-Rwanda before embarking on his doctoral studies at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. His doctoral project explores the use of mHealth and Telemedicine to break barriers to post-discharge follow-up for women who have undergone cesarean section in resource-limited and rural settings. He utilises different research designs extending from cross-sectional to randomised control trials, mainly with quantitative analyses, to explore patterns and predictors of relevant health events in his research areas. His area of expertise includes global surgery, access to care, maternal and child health, and the use of mobile health (mHealth) in improving healthcare delivery. He won different awards from world-class scientific institutions such as the American Surgical Congress and Health Systems Global. Mr Nkurunziza is an editorial board member for BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and reviews for renown journals including, but not limited to, BMC and BMJ journals.