Announcing the 2019 Department of Surgery Outstanding Citizenship Award Recipients

The Department of Surgery Outstanding Citizenship Award is given annually to two faculty members who exemplify an unwavering dedication to the department, their colleagues and the Brigham community. This years recipients are Robert Riviello, MD, MPH and Jennifer Shin, MD, SM.


Robert Riviello, MD, MPH
Associate Surgeon, Division of Trauma, Burn, Surgical & Critical Care, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Director of Global Surgery Programs, Center for Surgery and Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Assistant Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School
Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Robert Riviello, MD, MPH, is an associate surgeon in the Division of Trauma, Burn, Surgical & Critical Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and serves as director of Global Surgery for the BWH Center for Surgery and Public Health (CSPH).

He received his medical degree from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Riviello completed a General Surgery Residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, TN and was a Fulbright International Fellow in Global Surgery at Centro Evangelico de Medicina in Lubango, Angola. He completed both an Acute Care and Burn Surgery Fellowship and Surgical Critical Care Fellowship at BWH.

Dr. Riviello has dedicated his career to improving surgical access for vulnerable people. Over the past decade he has split his time between BWH and sub-Saharan Africa, strengthening surgical services, surgical training programs, surgical device innovation, and providing mentorship to the CSPH’s global surgery fellows. His clinical and research interests are in global health, specifically the reduction of disparities and the expansion of surgical delivery for low-income populations by developing surgical workforce and surgical infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa.


Jennifer J. Shin, MD, SM
Associate Surgeon, Division of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Associate Chair for Faculty Development, Department of Surgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Associate Professor of Otolaryngology, Harvard Medical School
Vice Chair, Academic Affairs at Longwood, Department of Otolaryngology, Harvard Medical School

Jennifer J. Shin, MD, SM, is a graduate of Harvard Radcliffe College and Harvard Medical School. She completed her residency and fellowship training in the Harvard Program, and was a fellow of the National Institutes of Health and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She also holds a degree in epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Shin has a longstanding interest in evidence-based practice and has served as chair of the Outcomes Research and Evidence-Based Medicine Leadership Group for the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation. She also served as co-chair of the expert panel convened by the academy to develop their national clinical consensus statement on pediatric chronic rhinosinusitis, and she served as vice chair of the clinical practice guideline on otitis media with effusion, a multidisciplinary effort supported by the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and the American Academy of Pediatrics. She also chairs one of the specialty’s seven clinical advisory committees, which are cooperative endeavors encompassing the American Board of Otolaryngology, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and subspecialty societies such as the American Laryngological Association and the American Neurotology Society. Dr. Shin also serves as the deputy editor for Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, one of the main journals in the field.

Her first book, Evidence-Based Otolaryngology (2008), was among the publisher’s most accessed works and has had over 55,000 accessions.


Welcoming New Faculty – Tanujit Dey, PhD

Please join us in welcoming Tanujit Dey, PhD, as a new faculty member in the Department of Surgery.

Tanujit Dey, PhD
Lead Investigator, Center for Surgery and Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Dr. Dey is a graduate of the University of Kalyani (West Bengal, India) and received a PhD in statistics from Case Western Reserve University. Most recently, Dr. Dey was an associate staff member in the Department of Quantitative Health Sciences at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute and also served as the head of Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute Biostatistics Core.

Prior to joining Cleveland Clinic, he spent six years at the College of William & Mary as a tenured associate professor of statistics in the Department of Mathematics. Dr. Dey also served as a visiting scholar at the Center for Stochastic and Chaotic Processes in Science and Technology, Department of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Case Western Reserve University.

He serves as associate editor for the Journal of Applied Probability and Statistics and Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation and also served on the Regional Advisory Board of the Eastern North American Region (ENAR) of the International Biometric Society (IBS).

Dr. Dey’s methodological research interests include: Bayesian statistics; big data; causal inference; data mining; ensembles; environmental spatial statistics; high dimensional variable and model selection; longitudinal data analysis; machine learning; mediation analysis; reliability theory; and survival analysis.

Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital Names Douglas Smink, MD, MPH, New Chief of Surgery

DOUGLAS S. SMINK, MD, MPH
Chief of Surgery, Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital
Vice Chair for Education,
Department of Surgery
Professor of Surgery,
Harvard Medical School


Dr. Smink received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, completed General Surgery Residency at BWH and a Minimally Invasive Surgery Fellowship at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.  His clinical interests include abdominal wall hernias, foregut surgery, and biliary tract disease. 

Dr. Smink also serves as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Surgical Education and was recently selected by the American College of Surgeons to the Academy of Master Surgeon Educators.

His research focuses on resident and faculty education and how to teach communication, leadership and decision-making to surgeons and surgical teams. He is the co-leader of the Surgical Culture Program at the BWH Center for Surgery and Public Health (CSPH) and a co-PI on the NIH R01 Provider Awareness Cultural Dexterity Toolkit for Surgeons (PACTS) grant.  He is also the co-director of the Surgical Coaching for Operative Performance Enhancement (SCOPE) Program at Ariadne Labs.