The Gastrointestinal and Endocrine Surgery Division of the Department of Surgery provides clinical coverage at Parkland Memorial Hospital, VA North Texas Health Care Services (Dallas), Zale Lipshy University Hospital and St. Paul Hospital. Our primary mission is to provide excellence in patient care, resident and student teaching and research. During the past several years there has been significant growth in all these areas.
We successfully recruited, Edward H. Livingston, M.D., FACS to fill the Hudson-Penn Chair in surgery and serve as our new Division Chief. Dr. Livingston hails from UCLA where he attended medical school and completed his residency in general surgery, remained on the faculty and ultimately rose to the rank of Professor of Surgery. While at UCLA he initiated a bariatric surgery program which became one of the largest academic bariatric surgical programs in the United States. He also was the Chair of the Department of Surgery and service line director for surgical and perioperative care at the Greater Los Angeles VA Health Care system. Dr. Livingston has numerous publications in the field of bariatric surgery and basic science research. He replaced Dr. Robert V. Rege, the prior division chief who is now the Department Chairman. The Division has a strong colorectal surgery program under the direction of Edward Livingston.
Dr. Mark Watson was trained at the prestigious Washington University School of Medicine where he received intensive exposure to advanced laparoscopic techniques. He then entered private practice in Northern California and had considerable experience in advanced laparoscopy, a major focus of the practice group. He moved to Texas and joined the Southwestern surgical faculty in 2002. Dr. Watson has extensive experience in all forms of laparoscopic surgery and has developed an active private practice as well as teaching students and residents in the SCMIS lab and Parkland Hospital.
Endocrine surgery case volume has been rapidly growing and is staffed by Drs. William Snyder, Shelby Holt and Fiemu Nwariaku . Dr. Snyder has been at UT Southwestern since 1971. Amongst the most popular attending surgeons with the residents, he has trained generations of Texas surgeons. Numerous teaching awards have been deservedly bestowed upon Dr. Snyder. An outstanding clinical surgeon, he has narrowed his clinical practice to that of endocrine surgery. He has attracted numerous referrals that have given our residents sufficient exposure to these procedures during their training to ensure their competencies. The endocrine practice that Dr. Snyder built has also served as the base for the development of Drs. Holt and Nwariaku's clinical practices.
Dr. Holt has been on our faculty for two years and has an excellent rapport with her patients as well as outstanding clinical outcomes. Dr. Holt’s academic interests have been in resident education and she chairs the curriculum committee for the UT Southwestern general surgery residency program.
Dr. Fiemu Nwariaku has been on the faculty for over 10 years. Dr. Nwariaku has a robust multidisciplinary clinical program in adrenal diseases in collaboration with the Division of Endocrinology. He also has major clinical interests in thyroid, parathyroid, pancreatic and adrenal diseases. He has published papers on surgical techniques and outcomes in patients with adrenal and pancreatic tumors, and his research group is particularly interested in mechanisms of tumor progression and metastases in thyroid cancer.
Dr. Nwariaku is also the Vice-Chair for Research in the Department of Surgery and he administers the Program Project Grant and NIH Training Grant within the Department of Surgery.
The bariatric surgery program is very active under the leadership of Edward H. Livingston, M.D., FACS The full range of bariatric surgery services is available at UT Southwestern. Ranging from open Roux-en-Y gastric bypass to minimally invasive laparoscopic banding placement. The most commonly performed weight loss operation at UT is the laparoscopic gastric bypass, which is associated with a very low morbidity and mortality rate. The procedures are performed both at Zale Lipshy and Parkland Memorial Hospital. In collaboration with Dr. Scott Grundy, the author of the NIH consensus statement that defined the scope of bariatric surgery in the United States, very active research programs are being pursued.
The Southwestern Center for Minimally Invasive Surgery (SCMIS) is a multi-disciplinary program administered by the Division of Gastrointestinal Surgery. The Center has received substantial industry support and has evolved into a state of the art program. Numerous minimally invasive conferences and programs are sponsored by SCMIS. The educational and conference facilities were recently constructed and are amongst the most modern available. The primary focus of SCMIS includes teaching programs for both residents, students and community surgeons. We also have impressive research facilities for the development of new technologies in the rapidly advancing arena of minimally invasive surgery.
The volume in pancreas and hepatobiliary surgery has expanded at a rapid rate.
After many years of missionary work in India, Dr. Rebekah Naylor returned to Dallas and joined the faculty on a part-time basis. She has been an invaluable resource to our students and residents in their surgical education. She brings to us a significant knowledge of third world medicine adding an educational dimension to which most other residents and medical students are not exposed.
Dr. Naylor is a general surgeon in the division and administers the student education programs. She is the Chief Editor of The Virtual Patient: A Self-directed Study Guide in Surgery. This is a case based, web curriculum for medical students in general surgery and is being used by other medical schools by license agreement.
Education is of paramount importance to the Division. Virtually every general surgical resident trained in the last thirty years has utilized the Selected Readings of General Surgery to implement their training and provide board review. Selected Readings continues to have strong international distribution. Its founder Dr. Robert McClelland remains on the faculty and still single-handedly edits each edition.
Basic science research is an important component of the Division’s activities.
