Mentor Spotlight: Jeffrey Siracuse, MD, MBA
Jeffrey Siracuse, MD, MBA, is Chief of the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery and Associate Chair of Surgery for Quality and Patient Safety at Boston Medical Center and a Professor of Surgery and Radiology at Boston University’s Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine.
Dr. Siracuse joined the BU/BMC faculty in July 2014 after completing his surgery residency at Beth Israel Deaconess, a vascular research fellowship at the Harvard-Longwood Research Training Program, and a clinical fellowship at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. His work focuses on clinical outcomes, safety, and quality improvement in vascular and endovascular surgery, primarily using large multi-center registries.
While at BU, he has had numerous medical student work with him on an institutional, regional, and national dataset projects. This includes Thomas McNamara, a recent CAMED graduate, who worked on how social determinants of health affect patients with peripheral arterial disease. Anish Patel studied penetrating neck trauma with vascular injury. Kyle Bui analyzed amputation outcomes in octogenarians. More recently, Wei Ni Zhou and Cynthia Huang were MSSRP students, funded by the Department of Surgery, who analyzed outcomes of conservative treatment of intermittent claudication and upper extremity bypass. With a few examples, he has a long history of student presentations and publications. All of these students have presented at national meetings and have published, or are in the process of publishing, first-author manuscripts.
Dr. Siracuse on mentorship: Mentorship means providing unwavering long-term support and creating clear structural pathways for a student’s professional growth, critical thinking, and eventual career placement. Success is ultimately judged by how they perform and how they mentor the next generation themselves. He often advises his mentees to set early goals, make sure you make the academic time, and establish a consistent routine. Productivity in surgical research relies on structure and consistency. The best ideas are the ones that come up as day-to-day challenges.