ChM Programme Director, Professor O James Garden

ChM in General Surgery Programme Director, Professor O James Garden was appointed Regius Professor of Clinical Surgery at the University of Edinburgh in 2000. He is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh but undertook his postgraduate training as a hepatobiliary, pancreatic and liver transplant surgeon in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Paris. He has been Honorary Consultant Surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh since 1988 and undertook the first successful liver transplant in Scotland in 1992. He is a council member of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and was Chairman of the RCSEd Quincentenary Congress (July 2005) and of the 7th World Congress of IHPBA (September 2006).

He is a well established figure in national and international surgery. He is past president of the Association of Upper GI Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, Secretary of the British Journal of Surgery Society and the James IV Association of Surgeons (Europe), and former Chairman of the Programme Committee of the European Surgical Association. He is a Council member of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and is President-Elect of the International Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Association (IHPBA).

His main clinical activity and research interests are in the specialty of hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery. He has written extensively in this area with some 240 research and clinical articles to his name and he has authored or edited 13 surgical textbooks. He is Editor-in-Chief of HPB, the official journal if the IHPBA, past Associate Editor of the World Journal of Surgery and currently serves on five editorial boards.

He is an honorary member of the German Surgical Society, the New Zealand Association of Surgeons, the British Columbia Society of Surgeons, the Eastern Surgical Society and South African Gastroenterology Society. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 2007 and of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada in 2008. He was appointed Surgeon to the Queen in Scotland in 2004.

He has strong interests in surgical training and education. He was a member of the Intercollegiate Examination Board in Surgery from 2002-2007 and served as secretary to the Board from 2004 and examiner from 1998. He believes that the ChM qualification represents a valuable means of supporting surgical trainees in their personal and professional development as they work towards the fellowship.

Professor Garden was honoured with a Chancellor's Award for Teaching in 2010 for his work on the ChM's sister programme, the ESSQ or MSc in Surgical Sciences, and for his other work in surgical teaching at the University of Edinburgh.