Message from the Dean

Welcome to the Department of Surgery Website!

To provide the highest quality of care for every patient, excellence in education and training for every surgical resident and fellow, and the advancement of the science of surgery through meaningful research – these are the top priorities of every faculty member in the Department of Surgery at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University.

We are a department that is bound together by our core values –Teamwork, Optimism, Professionalism & Quality.  These core values define who we are. They energize us and make work fun. In addition, the six ACGME core competencies help us achieve clinical excellence because they define what we do and help us measure it. These core competencies – patient care, medical knowledge, practice-based learning and improvement, interpersonal and communication skills, professionalism, and systems-based practice – help us recognize and measure clinical excellence.

Temple is one of the nation’s most exciting places to work. Our surgical volume continues to grow yearly, providing residents with an outstanding breadth and depth of experience in the primary and secondary areas of general surgery. New technology has been added with an emphasis on minimally invasive procedures and robotic surgery.  Our faculty has nearly doubled in recent years.

Educationally, we have strengthened our formal didactic program by both consolidating the mandatory teaching conferences on Wednesday morning, and freeing our residents from clinical responsibilities during this time. We take the 80-hour workweek seriously, and have been in compliance with this important ACGME since its inception. We have also developed and refined a surgical-skills curriculum that is delivered every Wednesday afternoon to four to six residents in Temple’s William Maul Measey Institute for Clinical Simulation and Patient Safety. Residents are free of clinical responsibility for these three hours and receive personalized hands-on level-appropriate instruction from a faculty member.

Academically, we have improved the elective research experience available to our junior residents. We are committed to providing high-quality research training for one or two years to any resident who desires it (this is not mandatory). We anticipate that at any given time we will have between two and four residents in the laboratory for a one- or two-year elective research experience.

I am frequently asked what we look for in residency applicants. The answer is simple: people who share our department’s core values and who have demonstrated by their prior performance that they have the potential to master the core competencies that define the art and science of surgery. Thank you for visiting our website. We welcome your inquiries and your application.

Amy J. Goldberg, MD, FACS
Marjorie Joy Katz Dean, Lewis Katz School of Medicine 
George S. Peters, MD and Louise C. Peters Chair and Professor, Surgery