Guest Faculty

Local Faculty

---

Shanda H. Blackmon, M.D., M.P.H., F.A.C.S., limits her practice to thoracic surgery, with a special interest in minimally invasive surgery and new technology. Dr. Blackmon completed college at The University of Texas in Austin where she worked as an artist painting for a year after college. She then went to Emory University Rollins School of Public health to obtain a Master’s degree followed by medical school at Morehouse in Atlanta, then followed by her residency in General Surgery at Georgia Baptist/Atlanta Medical Center. She then completed Cardiothoracic Surgery Residency at Baylor College of Medicine. She was awarded the Clinical Instructorship position in thoracic surgical oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, serving on the faculty until she was recruited to build an innovative Division of Thoracic Surgery at Houston Methodist Hospital. Dr. Blackmon was Chief of the Division of Thoracic Surgery at Houston Methodist Hospital for eight years, serving as the Director of The Methodist Multidisciplinary Thoracic Tumor Board and Director of the Lung Cancer Screening Program. She has now joined 5 other surgeons at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, where she currently practices in the Division of Thoracic Surgery. She currently is the principal investigator or a co-investigator at Mayo Clinic in several clinical trials addressing mediastinal tumors, lung cancer, mesothelioma, esophageal cancer & diseases of the esophagus. She teaches regular courses on endoluminal techniques and VATS lobectomy. In addition to her experience with minimally invasive resections of lung and esophageal tumors, she specialized on endoluminal technology. She also holds a patent for innovating/design of an endoluminal buttressed anastomotic esophageal device which she is co-developing with Boston Scientific. She has developed a specialized team to reconstruct the esophagus with jejunum and leads an ablation team that has developed a novel approach to treating patients with lung tumors with three funded clinical trials. She is also a pioneer in three dimensional printing and building prototypes for complex thoracic resections using unique imaging modalities.

She is Board-certified by the American Board of Surgery and the American Board of Thoracic Surgery. She is currently Associate Professor, Mayo Clinic, Division of Thoracic Surgery. She is a member of AATS, WTS, STS, STSA, ACS, AWS, SAGES, and GTSC.

She serves on the following boards or councils: TSFRE, STS, WTS, ATS, STSA, and the ACS Thoracic Advisory Council. Dr. Blackmon has published several professional papers and textbook chapters, edited many textbooks, and has made numerous scientific presentations on the topics of thoracic surgery, thoracic oncology, new technology, and minimally invasive surgery. She is a current Deputy Editor for The Annals of Thoracic Surgery.

Back to top

---

Hiroshi Date, MD is a Chairman and Professor, Department of Thoracic Surgery, Kyoto University.

He was trained by Drs Joel D Cooper and G Alexander Patterson at Washington University as a research (1989-91) and a clinical lung transplant fellow (1994-5). He also spent a year (1993-4) as a general thoracic fellow at The Cleveland Clinic Foundation directed by Dr Thomas W Rice. In 1998, he performed the first successful living-donor lobar lung transplantation in Japan. Since then, he has performed 204 lung transplants resulting in 70% survival rate at 10-years.

Dr. Date has authored more than 430 peer-reviewed publications in various fields of general thoracic surgery. He has performed more than 3,500 thoracotomies for lung cancer, mediastinal tumor, lung volume reduction surgery and lung transplantation, etc. He started his professorship from April 2006 at Okayama University. In October 2007, he was invited to Kyoto University as a chairman and professor, Department of Thoracic Surgery.

Back to top

---

Dr. Raja Flores is a prominent surgeon in the treatment of lung cancer, mesothelioma, esophageal cancer and non-malignant thoracic diseases. He is the Chairman of the Department of Thoracic Surgery, Ames Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Mount Sinai Health System, Icahn School of Medicine. Prior to joining Mount Sinai, he was an Attending Surgeon at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Dr. Flores has published over 150 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals as well as numerous chapters in prestigious thoracic surgery textbooks. Dr. Flores was also a Guest Editor for the Thoracic Surgery Clinics Current Controversies in Thoracic Surgery.

Dr. Flores earned an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from New York University and attended the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, receiving his Medical Degree in 1992. He then spent five years at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center pursuing his General Surgery Internship and General Surgery Residency. He then completed a Thoracic Oncology Clinical Research Fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Dana Farber Cancer Institute/CALGB in Boston, and his Cardiothoracic Surgery Residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He also received a Masters in Biostatistics from Columbia University.

Back to top

---

Dr. Liberman completed medical school and general surgery residency at McGill University in Montreal. He also received a PhD in experimental surgery from McGill in 2008. After leaving McGill, Dr. Liberman completed a fellowship in cardiothoracic surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts where he concentrated on complex airway surgery. He then completed two additional fellowships in interventional tracheo-bronchial endoscopy and interventional GI endoscopy.

Dr. Liberman joined the faculty at the University of Montreal in 2009 and established a comprehensive thoracic interventional endoscopy center. Dr. Liberman is a minimally invasive thoracic surgeon interested in interventional thoracic endoscopy, thoracic oncology and airway surgery. He is the Director of the CHUM Endoscopic Tracheobronchial and Oesophageal Center (C.E.T.O.C.).

His research interests include new minimally invasive techniques for staging and treatment of lung cancer and ultrasonographic technology in thoracic surgery. He also is currently evaluating Natural Orifice Trans-Lumenal Endoscopic Surgery in the treatment of thoracic malignancy and novel methods for performing VATS lobectomy. His research laboratory focuses on technology assessment and technology development in minimally invasive thoracic oncology and endoscopy.

Dr. Liberman’s Laboratory is funded through the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Fonds de Recherche en Santé du Quebec (FRSQ), the Society of University Surgeons (SUS), the Thoracic Surgery Research Foundation of Montreal as well as multiple collaborative research projects with industry.

Back to top

Prof. Olaf Mercier, MD, PhD
Professor of Thoracic Surgery and Director of the Innovation and Research Unit
Department of Thoracic and Vascular Surgery and Heart-Lung Transplantation
Marie Lannelongue Hospital
Paris Sud University, France

Professor Olaf Mercier qualified as a professor in 2014. He is professor of Thoracic & Cardiovascular Surgery and is currently the director of the Innovation and Research Unit of Marie Lannelongue Hospital. His research focuses on lung transplantation, lung perfusion, right ventricle dysfunction, and bioengineering, He teaches at the Paris Sud University School of Medicine and has been involved as investigator or co-investigator in clinical and research trials. He recently had been granted from the French Government for the development of an artificial lung. Since 2016, Professor Mercier has been appointed as President of the scientific committee of the French Society of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery (SFCTCV).

Back to top