Strauss lecturer to compare evaluation for surgeons and pilots

The Department of Surgery will present the 51st annual Strauss Lecture at 4 p.m., Friday, Sept. 15, in Hogness Auditorium of the Health Sciences Center.

“Assessing Competence: A Tale of Two Professions” is the topic for Dr. Doanld Trunkey, professor and chair of the Department of Surgery at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. He will compare the ways surgeons and commercial airline pilots assess and assure competence over time, against a background of research on the effects of aging on physical and mental performance.

Trunkey

Trunkey grew up in Eastern Washington and earned his M.D. from the UW after graduating from Washington State University. He became a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco, after postgraduate training in Oregon, Dallas, and UCSF, as well as two years in the U.S. Army in Germany.

In San Francisco, he was involved primarily with care for trauma patients, and became chief of the Burn Center at San Francisco General Hospital. He also pursued vascuar surgery and non-cardiac chest surgery, and established a laboratory to study mechanisms of shock at the cellular level. In 1978 he became chief of surgery at San Francisco General and vice chair of the Department of Surgery at UCSF. In 1986 he was recruited to Oregon Health Sciences University to become chair of surgery there. He returned to active duty in the Army during the Desert Storm action in 1990.

Trunkey has been president of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma and vice chair of the American Board of Surgery. He is president of the U.S. chapter of the International Society of Surgery and serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of Trauma and Surgery. His current interests include trauma care, elective surgery, shock-related research and teaching residents and students. He is also an honorary fellow in several foreign surgical colleges.

The lecture honors the late Dr. Alfred Strauss, a 1904 UW graduate who went on to earn an M.D. degree from Rush Medical College of Chicago. As an indication of his continued interest in the UW, Strauss began sponsoring annual surgical lectureships at the School of Medicine in 1950. Today, sponsorship of the Strauss Lecture is maintained by Margery Friedlander, Strauss’ daughter. ¶

Claire Dietz