I am pleased to introduce myself and write to you as the Director of Education and Spine Fellowship Training for the Spine Institute Foundation. After I finished my medical school training at University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and Orthopaedic residency at The University of Maryland Medical Center/Shock Trauma Hospital and Johns Hopkins Hospital, I came to Cedars-Sinai Hospital and completed my complex spine fellowship with J Patrick Johnson. That has been over 5 years ago and it certainly feels as if time has flown by! Dr. Johnson has trained over 64 fellow surgeons during his career, and it has been my recent duty to assist him and The Foundation in continuing to provide the best program and training environment for these young surgeons.

The mission of the Education and Spine Fellowship Training program is three fold: 1) To nurture and develop the mind of a compassionate physician 2) To train the basic and advanced technical skills required for a fellow to competently function as an independent spine surgeon 3) To encourage educational efforts that involve research projects, scientific publications and other academic contributions to the scientific field. In the period on one year, we demand and ask a significant amount of our Fellows to work feverishly and continuously on all aspects of this mission in order to prepare them for their future practices.

The goals of the Education and Spine Fellowship Training program cannot be achieved without the generous contributions and financial support of our benefactors. The national and international conferences that our fellows travel to in order to present their research, the educational conferences that we hold, the cadaver labs that we organize cannot be done without the financial support received from the Spine Foundation. As a recent example, we recently published 6 major scientific articles in March 2014 on computer-guidance navigation in a collaborative effort with two of our past Fellows. With the support received from the Foundation, these papers were well received when presented nationally at conferences in Las Vegas, Miami and San Francisco.

Upcoming, the Education program International efforts will continue with our training program on “Intraoperative Spinal Navigation” at the World Congress of Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery in Paris, France in June 2014. We also look forward to planning the next international humanitarian effort “Health Volunteers Overseas” as we travel to underserved countries to provide basic and emergent spine care.

The complete list of activities undertaken in the Education and Spine Fellowship Training program are too long for one newsletter! I look forward to sharing more of our endeavors with you through future Foundation newsletter updates. I continue to be excited about our efforts, and thank you for your ongoing generosity and support for the Spine Institute Foundation.

Please visit us at www.spineinstitute.org or contact us info@spineinstitute.org

Sincerely,

Terrence T. Kim, MD
Director of Education and Spine Fellowship Training
Spine Institute Foundation