Jo Buyske, MD, FACS, is the 2026 recipient of the Dr. Mary Edwards Walker Inspiring Women in Surgery Award. A general surgeon who specialized in minimally invasive, foregut, and acute care surgery, Dr. Buyske is being honored for her significant contributions to advancing women in surgery.
Transforming the ABS
Dr. Buyske is a groundbreaking surgeon. She has served as the executive director and CEO of the American Board of Surgery (ABS) since 2017 (having earlier been a volunteer oral examiner, then a director and the associate executive director of the same organization). She is the first woman to hold the role of ABS CEO. She was also the first female president of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons.
Her work has helped to reshape the process of surgical training nationwide. Early in her tenure, she led an organization-wide restructuring that realigned specialty representation in governance and created a general surgery board as an individual unit.
Under her leadership, the ABS modernized board certification in multiple ways. These included updating the lifelong certification process to reflect the pace of clinical advancement and better meet the needs of practicing surgeons.
Dr. Buyske also helped advance the use of entrustable professional activities and competency-based learning to train surgeons.
Separately, she has worked to institute greater flexibility throughout surgical training via leave policies, updated approaches to scheduling, and international rotation options. “There was no flexibility in the system. It wasn’t an education demand; it was a workforce demand,” she explained, with a lot of “mythology” around being constantly available to patients: “You have to be available to your patients all the time, so you can’t have a family. I was like, ‘I hear you, yet I also note that you went to Germany to give a keynote address. So, were you available for your patients? It sounds like you can be unavailable for some reasons.’”
Interested in ensuring the surgical workforce remains robust, Dr. Buyske helped devise family-friendly policies, create on-ramps back to clinical practice for surgeons who had stepped away, and foster a cultural shift around workplace standards.
For Dr. Buyske, this was about serving all surgeons, not just women.
“I didn’t set about trying to inspire and uplift women in surgery,” she said, referring to the award she will receive. “It was about trying to be fair, do the right thing, and be practical. Too often, I think women don’t get treated fairly, people don’t necessarily do the right thing, and the practicalities are absurd… if you do that, you end up really helping women.”
A Civil War Shaped Her Calling
Dr. Buyske received her medical degree from Columbia University in New York, New York, and completed a general surgery residency and research fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. After starting her career at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts, she eventually became chief of surgery and director of minimally invasive surgery at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center and associate professor of clinical surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, both in Philadelphia.
However, that biography does not capture a pivotal part of her life’s work: her involvement in global surgery.
As a medical intern, she earned a spot on a Médecins du Monde and Médecins Sans Frontières mission to Mozambique, which was then in the late stages of a lengthy civil war. Shocked by the country’s profound needs, she felt a strong commitment to help. “I knew I wanted to do surgery in underserved environments, wherever those might be,” she said.
It took nearly another quarter-century to begin. Using a directory of volunteerism opportunities maintained by the ACS Health Outreach Program for Equity in Global Surgery (ACS H.O.P.E.®; then known as Operation Giving Back), she contacted three organizations. She collaborated with each but made her strongest connection to Partners In Health, a nonprofit with significant reach in Haiti.
She initially served as a respite surgeon in Port-au-Prince, relieving local surgeons for time off. “I loved the MacGyver aspect of it. I loved taking care of people who just needed to be taken care of,” she said. “My favorite operation was a machete wound to the forearm. I was like, ‘Machete wound? I’m a nice girl from northern New Jersey. I’ve never seen this.’ But I fixed it.”
Eventually, she used her position at ABS to offer more, spending 5 years helping to secure accreditation for the country’s main teaching hospital, Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais in Mirebalais, and creating a system for training surgeons, nurse anesthetists, obstetrician-gynecologists, and emergency physicians. “We built it from the ground up, specific to Haiti, in cooperation with the government, the Ministry of Health, and Partners In Health,” she said.
“They asked me back for their graduation when that first class of entering interns came. That, I think, that was one of the most profound moments of my life,” she said. “I was the right person with the right skills that they needed right now, and this is what I was put here to do.”
One-Way Ticket
Dr. Buyske is a member of the board and past director of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-International and a director of the American Board of Medical Specialties. She also is an adjunct professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, where her practice has included minimally invasive general and gastrointestinal surgery and acute care surgery.
However, in 2027, she will retire from the ABS and all other roles in the surgical profession. “I don’t cling to the past in any way,” she said. “I have a one-way ticket to Paris.”
She is happy to share her thoughts for younger surgeons, however.
“Surgery is an incredible career, in whatever form it morphs into going forward. It’s not going to be the career I had. It’s not going to be the one that my predecessors had,” she said. “But the core of it is caring for people and helping them through some of the most difficult times of their life. It’s such a gift to have the tools and the opportunity to be that person.”
The Inspiring Women in Surgery Award is presented annually at Clinical Congress in recognition of an individual’s contributions to the advancement of women in the field of surgery. The award honors the fortitude and accomplishments of Mary Edwards Walker, MD (1832–1919). Dr. Walker volunteered as a surgeon during the Civil War, becoming the first female surgeon to receive a commission with the US Army. As a result of her service, she became the only female recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
