General Surgery Residency Program
Lawrence Lottenberg, M.D.
Chair, Department of Surgery
Interim Program Director, General Surgery Residency
Professor of Surgery
Director of Surgical Simulation
Welcome to the Florida Atlantic University Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine General Surgery Residency and thank you for your interest in our program.
It is our pleasure to provide you with a brief overview of the program and some details about our residents, faculty, rotations, and our comprehensive curriculum.
It is our first and foremost goal to train highly qualified surgical specialists and future leaders that can draw from a broad-based educational experience to provide evidence-based, high-quality, cost-effective care to patients with a wide range of surgical diseases. To this end we have designed a surgical training program that emphasizes education over service, strong academic affiliations and opportunities for scholarship, exposure to all major surgical sub-specialties, as well as deep ties to the community and our patients.
A well-chosen blend of community-based and academic hospitals and faculty expose our residents and students to all facets of modern-day surgery that will allow our residents to make well-informed career choices in both academic and non-academic settings.
The General Surgery residency program at FAU is a fully ACGME accredited, non-pyramidal program approved to train 7 categorical residents per year, and 5 preliminary residents per year, for PGY I and II. The program is structured into five clinical years and one unique value-added year of scholarship that is usually completed after the third clinical year. During the value-added year, under the guidance of the Program Director and faculty mentors, each resident can choose to complete research projects or additional qualifications aimed at enhancing his/her capabilities to successfully pursue the career of choice.
Knowledge, skills and leadership are the most powerful tools we possess as physicians and surgeons, and the FAU Program in General Surgery strives to foster an environment of learning and scholarship, which will enable our graduates to develop excellent patient management skills, technical and procedural skills, as well as the ability to critically appraise the literature and keep abreast of surgical and technological advances years after graduating from the program. Our residents will develop the ability to understand how to teach, learn and work together efficiently across multi-specialty and multi-professional care delivery-systems in today’s complex health care environment.
Clinical Postgraduate Years 1 to 2
The first two clinical years of residency training are focused on the development of foundational skills and experiences in general surgery and its subspecialties. Residents spend time in General Surgery at our core hospitals, and on rotations in Trauma and Pediatric Surgery, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Breast, and Vascular Surgery, as well as Burn and Transplantation Surgery. While both years place an emphasis on early operative exposure and development of procedural skills, rotations in the second year also focus on developing of the resident’s consultation and critical care management skills.
Clinical Postgraduate Years 3 to 5
The educational experiences in the senior years are designed to deepen the understanding and skills in all areas of General Surgery and Surgical Oncology, in addition to comprehensive exposure in Endoscopy, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Vascular, Pediatric, and Trauma and Acute Care Surgery.
In addition to the scheduled rotations, the resident will be given the opportunity to further engage in an area of his/her interest in the PGY IV elective rotation.
The Value-Added Year of Scholarship
To train surgeons to meet the needs and challenges of an ever changing healthcare environment, we have incorporated a unique value-added year of post-graduate training into our program design. The residents will usually complete this year after their third clinical year of training; during that year the residents may choose to complete research with a highly recognized and productive mentor in their field of interest, an in-residency trauma/critical care fellowship or potentially a one-year executive master degree program related to the business of medicine, public health and health sciences or medical informatics, thereby graduating from our program with substantial added qualifications.
For further information about our program, please feel free to browse the remainder of our website.
We wish you the best of luck as you embark on your surgical career.