Layton F. Rikkers, MD, FACS, an emeritus professor of hepatobiliary, pancreatic, and gastrointestinal surgery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will receive the Distinguished Service Award—the ACS’s highest annual honor—during tonight’s Convocation at Clinical Congress 2024 in San Francisco, California. The ceremony will be livestreamed and available on-demand soon after its conclusion.
The award recognizes exceptional and continuous service as an ACS Fellow, as well as a career distinguished by devotion to patient care and the principles and ideals that guide all surgeons in their professional practice.
Dr. Rikkers, known as Bing, said: “I’m certainly very honored and humbled. I realize that there are hundreds of other people who are just as deserving.”
An ACS Fellow since 1980, he has held many committee and leadership roles at the College, including positions on the Young Surgeons Committee, Surgical Education in Medical Schools Committee, Liaison Program Committee, and the Committee on Coaching the Next Generation. In addition, he served on the Board of Governors for 6 years (2005–2011) and as a First Vice-President (2013–2014). Because he also was involved, over time, as a leader in many other surgical organizations, he was able to help advance the connections of the College to other surgical organizations.
“The thing I am most proud of and enjoyed so very much was conceiving and directing the Surgeons as Leaders course,” he said.
At the behest of Past-ACS Executive Director Thomas R. Russell, MD, FACS, Dr. Rikkers helped create this course. It is meant for surgeons who currently serve or aspire to serve in leadership positions to gain skills in the principles and practice of leadership, from the operating room to the boardroom. The course remains popular among aspiring surgeon leaders.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Rikkers served for 12 years as the A. R. Curreri Professor of Surgery and Chair. Other career positions include acting chair of the Division of General Surgery at The University of Utah in Salt Lake City, as well as professor and chair of the Department of Surgery at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. There, he held the positions of interim dean and chair at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine.
In these roles, he heavily emphasized mentorship and education of students, residents, and faculty.
As a result of his clinical excellence and enthusiasm for education, he has been memorialized several times, including in the Layton F. Rikkers, MD, Master Clinician Award of the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract. He has several more namesakes at the Department of Surgery at the University of Wisconsin: the Layton F. Rikkers Surgery Education Retreat, Layton F. Rikkers Chair in Surgical Leadership, and Layton F. Rikkers Surgical Society, an alumni group.
Dr. Rikkers earned his medical degree at Stanford University in California and completed a general surgery residency at The University of Utah. At Utah and the Royal Free Hospital in London, England, he performed hepatological laboratory research, and then he completed a surgical hepatology fellowship with W. Dean Warren, MD, at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
