Presidential Address: Leadership as Destiny: Instinct, Judgment, and the Innovation Imperative in Cardiothoracic Surgery

Emile Bacha

Speaker

Dr. Emile Bacha is a US board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon with a subspecialization in pediatric cardiac surgery. Dr. Bacha is a tenured Professor of Surgery at Columbia University and currently the Chief of the Division of Cardiac, Thoracic, and Vascular Surgery at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, and Director of Congenital Heart Surgery at NYP/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and Komansky-Weill-Cornell Children’s. Prior to that, he was Senior Associate in Cardiac Surgery at the Children's Hospital Boston and Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Bacha received his medical degree at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. He completed his surgical residency at MGH and Emory, followed by a research fellowship at the Hopital Marie-Lannelongue of Paris-Sud University. He then completed a fellowship in cardiothoracic surgery at MGH in 1989. He has been supported by grants from the NIH, AATS, and TSFRE. Dr. Bacha is one of the early developers of the "hybrid stage I" procedure for hypoplastic left heart syndrome. He is also the principal developer of a widely accepted technical competency metric for pediatric heart surgeons. Dr. Bacha has published more than 250 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He is a past-Associate Editor of the Journal for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, and a member of the AATS, STS, the Congenital Heart Surgeons' Society (CHSS), the ACC and ACS. He currently serves as the Treasurer for the AATS and as Secretary of the CHSS.