ORIGINAL ARTICLE – HEALTHCARE POLICY AND OUTCOMES A Society in Transition: Presidential Remarks at the 65th Annual SSO Cancer Symposium

I would like to express to the membership of the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) how deeply honored I have been to serve as your 65th president. This was an unde-served and unexpected privilege. Our specialty is at an inflection point in history occa-sioned by the unanimous approval of subspecialty board certification by the American Board of Surgery. The 21st century is an exciting time to be a surgical oncologist, with our deeper understanding of cancer biology and a contin-uous pipeline of molecules that target oncogenes and signaling pathways, and enhance antitumor immunity. ROLE MODELS IN MY ACADEMIC CAREER I want to begin my presidential address by thanking two remarkable surgical leaders: Monica Morrow, who will succeed me as president, and Mitch Posner, my immediate predecessor. Many of you already know what I learned over the last year: Monica is hard-working, highly orga-nized, articulate, and purposeful, as well as a preeminent expert in breast diseases. This society has much to look forward to during her presidency. As I indicated last year when I introduced him to you as president, Mitch is the real deal. He is hard-working, a superior clinical surgeon and investigator, a great leader, and a fundamentally decent person. It has been a privilege to have my term flanked by these two fine surgical leaders (Fig. 1). I am indebted to many individuals throughout my career, and I feel obligated to quickly acknowledge them. All were role models; some were mentors. A role model is a person regarded as a good example to follow, whose behavior and quality is worth adopting. Seven faculty at Johns Hopkins had an important impact early in my career: the senior vascular and transplant sur-geon Mel Williams, in whose laboratory I first worked; Mack Holmes and Mike Zinner, on whose services I worked as a medical student; and John Cameron, Saul Roseman, and my PhD advisor, Hyun Shin, and his senio