Global Surgery Speakers

Youmna Sherif, MD

Youmna Sherif is a 3rd year resident in the global surgery track at the Baylor College of Medicine. Her interests include global surgery education, ethics of global surgery, surgical capacity building, and surgical infrastructure. In pursuit of these interests, she has engaged in global surgery work in Egypt, Malawi, Turkey, and Uganda. In conjunction with community partners in these nations she has performed research on the structure of global surgery education in high income countries, the professional development of non-physician clinicians in Sub-Saharan Africa, global surgery scale-up models, the use of guidelines and surgical standards in low-middle income countries, humanism in medicine, and Islamic Bioethics as it relates to care of the female. She is also a member of the Gold Humanism Society and the Texas Children’s Clinical Ethics Committee.

Kjersti Aagaard, MD, PhD, FACOG

Dr. Kjersti Aagaard is the Henry and Emma Meyer Professor & Endowed Chair in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. She serves as Vice Chair of Research for Obstetrics & Gynecology, and a professor of in the Departments of Molecular and Human Genetics, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Molecular Physiology and Biophysics. She is a member of the Center for Reproductive Medicine, Digestive Disease Center, Eisenberg Center for Decision Sciences, the Center for Microbiome and Metagenomics Research, and the School for Tropical Medicine. She is a co-Director in the Baylor College of Medicine MSTP MD PhD program. Dr. Aagaard joined the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Childrens immediately after completing her fellowship in 2007. Her career as a physician-scientist has included active and supported efforts in research, clinical care, education, mentorship and public health advocacy. Her clinical interests include emerging obstetrical infectious diseases, preterm birth, diabetes and hypertensive disorders in pregnancy, maternal smoking and environmental exposures, and the detection and diagnosis of congenital and genetic anomalies. Her clinical and translational research interests parallel her clinical interests, and focus on the role of the microbiome in pregnancy and early developmental programming, and the impact of key exposures in pregnancy (such as nutrition, diabetes, maternal high fat diet, smoking, and environmental chemical exposures) on fetal development and later in life disease. 

Jed Nuchtern, MD

Dr. Jed G. Nuchtern is committed to providing pediatric surgical care with special attention to the surgical needs of children with cancer and the needs of their families. This philosophy combines dedication to exceptional education and training, advanced research, and the development of newer and better treatments and procedures. Dr. Nuchtern takes an active role in the education and mentoring of the fellows, and residents and medical students on rotation to the Pediatric Surgery Service at Texas Children’s Hospital. Dr. Nuchtern leads a collaborative research program that includes translational and clinical research on developing new treatments for pediatric solid tumors, particularly neuroblastoma. The primary focus in his laboratory is identifying new targets for neuroblastoma therapy. Bioinformatic studies have identified several proteins whose expression is increased in high-risk neuroblastoma tumors. The laboratory has validated these findings and demonstrated that blocking the expression of these target proteins decreases tumor growth and progression. Current research seeks to identify the pathways through which these molecules affect tumor progression.