Well, good morning. It's really a great honor for me to introduce Dr. Anthony Gerald Gallagher as our next speaker. Dr. Gallagher received his Bachelor of Science in 1988 at the University of Ulster, then went on to receive his Ph.D. at Trinity College in Dublin in 1992. Tony was the very first distinguished Fulbright scholar from Ireland and came to the U.S. where he worked with Dr. Rick Satava at Yale and actually had the first paper to show that surgical skills that were trained via simulation were actually translatable to the operating room. With his good friend, Gerald O'Sullivan, he actually wrote one of the seminal books on surgical simulation, The Fundamentals of Surgical Simulation, Principles in Practice, and that was published in 2011. My copy has been worked through so often that I've scotch taped pages together. It was with great reluctance that I loaned it to Rick Ryu, and I'm very hopeful that I get it back with all the pages present. Tony went on then in 2013 and was awarded the Doctor of Science degree for his work on the assessment and training of surgeons for image-guided medicine, and that was quite an honor for Tony. Tony is incredibly well published of the hundred most cited papers regarding surgical education. Tony is either an author or a co-author on eight of them, two of the top ten. He is the primary author, and he has the most cited paper on surgical education. So, very prolific. I was speaking earlier at a booth to someone, and they said, oh, we know Tony Gallagher. His name is brought up in our office daily. Currently, Tony is at the University of Ulster, where he's a visiting professor and is the ORSI Robotic Surgery Academy Director in Belgium. Just prior to that, when we had worked with him, he was at University of College Cork, where he was a professor of technology-enhanced learning. Tony has been an incredible friend and collaborator with Anna. Back in approximately 2010, the Magellan Project was started, and the Surgical Simulation Group basically asked the question, is there a better way to train surgeons than we do right now? We've been training using the apprenticeship model for some 100 years or more, and we sailed the world and came up with the concept, came across the concept, I should say, of proficiency-based progression training. I think it's without argument that Tony is the world's authority on proficiency-based progression training for procedural skills and surgery. By serendipity, Tony and I got to know each other, had some dialogues, and then Tony was good enough to agree to work with Anna. Tony has really been the chief architect of the entire Copernicus series of investigations that Anna has performed. It's with great pleasure that I introduce Dr. Gallagher, who is going to address the topic of simulation training, The Future is Now. Tony?

Dr. Anthony Gerald Gallagher

surgeon

simulation training

surgical skills

education