Posted: March 1, 2019
Valerie W. Rusch, MD, FACS, was elected to serve as the 2018-2019 president-elect of the American College of Surgeons. Dr. Rusch is the vice chair for Clinical Research in the Department of Surgery and the Miner Family Chair in Intrathoracic Cancers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and professor of surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is also the chair of the Mesothelioma Subcommittee of the IASLC Lung Cancer Staging Committee. Dr. Rusch was among the first women in the United States to be board certified as a thoracic oncology surgeon and, in 2012, she received The Nina Starr Braunwald Award from the Association of Women Surgeons for lifetime contributions to the advancement of women in surgery. She is closely involved with the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC), having served most recently as chair of the Thoracic Expert Panel for the AJCC Cancer Staging Manual, Eighth Edition. ✦
