Prof. Laurence Chiché is a professor of surgery and director for the department of surgery at Bordeaux University, France. By reputation in the transplant community, she is known as a highly skilled gastrointestinal surgeon, and I personally know one of her trainees, who speaks passionately of her excellence as a surgeon, clinical investigator, educator, and leader. She clearly has become a highly respected leader in academic surgery in France. She also is an accomplished scholar in the field of transplantation, and her program at Bordeaux is the second largest liver transplantation program in France.
Professor Chiché has had a most distinguished career pathway, graduating medical school from the University Paris V–CHU Meckler-Enfants Maladies before completing her general and abdominal surgical training at the Hopitaux de Paris. Her medical training was coupled with a research fellowship studying the use of baboon hepatic xenografts as a bridge for fulminant hepatic failure. She received her medical degree in 1990 and completed her formative clinical training at the Hôpital Paul-Brousse, Paris, under the mentorship of Prof. Henri Bismuth, MD, FACS(Hon), who also is an Honorary Fellow of our College. It was there that she forged her expertise in hepatobiliary and liver transplantation surgery, which led to her 1993 appointment as assistant professor of surgery at the University Hospital of Caen, France. In 2003, now recognized as a highly productive scholar and clinician, she was promoted to professor of digestive surgery and named head of their digestive surgery department’s hepatobiliary surgery and liver transplantation unit. She was promoted again in 2010 to chief of their department of digestive surgery before being recruited in 2012 by Bordeaux University to fill the role of chief of the liver transplantation program. In 2017, Professor Chiché was named director of the University Hospital of Bordeaux. In that role, she holds responsibility for the academic advancement of the faculty, clinical programs in the department of surgery, training of surgical residents and fellows, and administrative oversight of the hospital’s surgical operations.
By invitation, Professor Chiché has made formative contributions to practice, setting national consensus groups in France on a wide variety of clinical problems in hepatobiliary and liver transplantation surgery. She is widely considered nationally and internationally to be a thought leader in this discipline and has served as a research mentor and doctoral thesis advisor to multiple candidates. She was one of three French academic surgeons selected for the traveling exchange program of the American Surgical Association, a highly competitive opportunity, and serves as an important and inspiring role model for women in surgery in Europe.
