Julie Ann Freischlag, MD, the first female president of the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS), will be the next president of the American College of Surgeons (ACS).
The Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based vascular surgeon was elected to serve as the 2020–2021 president-elect of the American College of Surgeons (ACS), a development announced at the recently concluded ACS Clinical Congress 2020 (Oct. 3–7). Her one-year term as president starts in October 2021.
Currently, Freischlag is CEO of Wake Forest Baptist Health and dean of Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, leadership roles she assumed in 2017 after nearly 30 years as a practicing surgeon and educator at medical institutions across the U.S.
In a storied career, she has been a committed surgeon-scientist and is considered an internationally renowned expert in the diagnosis and treatment of thoracic outlet syndrome.
Freischlag was also a national investigator of the OVER (Open versus endovascular repair) Veterans Affairs Cooperative Study, a multicenter randomized trial investigating the repair of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs). She has further led or participated in research selected for hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and awards on topic areas including aneurysms, vascular grafts and peripheral vascular disease.
A Fellow of the American College of Surgeons (FACS) since 1991, Freischlag has served in various leadership roles within the organization, including as an ACS governor (2000–2006) and as secretary (2002–2006).
She was the 2013 president of the SVS.
