Hi, I'm Mark Krieger, and it's my great honor to welcome you to the 49th Annual Meeting of the ANS-CNS Section on Pediatric Neurological Surgery. My hope is that in the next three days, through a combination of live talks, pre-recorded talks, a whole lot of planning, and some technological wizardry, we will present some great science and develop you in the community of pediatric neurosurgery. As Chair of the Section, my goal right now is to open the meeting, deliver my chair address, and introduce you to the meeting format, all in the next nine minutes and 30 seconds. For those of you whom I haven't met, I serve as the Surgeon-in-Chief at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time on Zoom meetings, balancing positional autonomy versus enterprise support and alignment, but it all works for me, because I deeply believe in the mission of Children's Hospital Los Angeles, and I also get to work with 10 great division chiefs, all of whom I've been friends with for 10 to 25 years, including Susan Durham, who's now the CHLA Chief of Neurosurgery. Also, because I get to include myself in the ranks of two other great pediatric neurosurgeons who are also Surgeons-in-Chief, Jeff Bojeman and Jim Drake, whom I look up to in so many ways, and with whom I can commiserate with about the pressures of the job, but who serve in far worse weather. I also get to lead our Neurological Institute and hold the Billy and Audrey Wilder Chair in Neurosurgery, which is cool, because Billy won Academy Awards for writer, producer, and director for films such as Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, and Double Indemnity. I still maintain my neuro-oncology surgical practice. I love taking care of patients and helping children through surgery, and I never take on any of these other roles that stop me from doing what I value most professionally. So, my one bit of advice is to focus on doing what you love and what sustains you with people you like and respect in an environment to which you align. I should say that, overall, I value my family the most. I'm the luckiest guy in the world to have the love and support of Christy, whose successes dwarf mine, and Sam, whose successes will dwarf mine, and I'm grateful that they let me tag along on their adventures. When we first met last December in Phoenix, we had no idea what this year would bring. An earth-shattering pandemic, the reckoning, the systemic racism after the killing of George Floyd, worldwide financial pain, and its tumultuous political environment have affected us all and our families, our teams, and our patients. I found strength in all this by focusing on the core mission of my roles. Over the last eight months, I've had to get up in front of my teams to support them in their market and their lives. I had no idea what to say. I had no idea what dangers lied ahead, how we'd get through it, and how long it would last. Those of you who know me know how much I hate uncertainty, but I quoted Langston Hughes and Lou Reed and Drake and Calvin Coolidge, one of my colleagues, told me that I let my freak flag fly, and I told my teams that they needed to do what they've always done, to take care of children, to keep their patients safe, and to take care of each other and keep each other safe. I told them to focus on these simple tasks, and I told them that they were all leaders on a noble mission. And I'd say the same to you. By being part of the community of pediatric neurosurgery, you are, by definition, a leader. Whatever your level, you've worked hard to improve the care of children with life-altering diseases. And my advice to you is to focus on this, to work at caring for children, through research and patient care, and to support and be supported by those around you. The purpose of this section is to help you in this mission. This became clear when, in the early morning minutes of this crisis, we had to decide how to handle this year's meeting. Do we cancel? Do we go virtual? We focused on our dual core missions, to help advance scientific discovery in our field and support a community of students, residents, fellows, advanced practice providers, and junior and senior attendings. We realized that neither of these tasks could wait nor be put on hold, and we decided to proceed with this virtual meeting. The section supports you in your quest for scientific discovery. We have section grants and awards, and collaborative grants with the NREF. Please take advantage of these. And at the meeting, we have over 100 of you presenting your work, and with fantastic expert talks accompanying these, with opportunities for discourse to keep it all building forward. The section wants to support you as you advance in your career. We've teamed up with the ACPNF, with Doug Brockmire, Cormac Marr, and Rob Bell's leadership, to put on a fellows boot camp yesterday, and a fellows showcase today, to support the career development of our fellows. And we are working with APP leadership to create a pediatric neurosurgery community for advanced practice providers, with an all-day session running concomitantly today. We initiated efforts to include students and residents in the section committee structure, and we will build upon these efforts in the future. The section also wants to encourage mentorship, and provide opportunities for you for leadership. I'd be nowhere without my own mentors, Gordon McComb, Marty Weiss, Steve Giannata, Micah Puzzo, Corey Raffel, and Mike Levy. And I'd also include my partners, and the 18 fellows, and over 50 residents at USC, whom I've learned from over the years. I've also admired and learned about leadership from the greats in our field, and gotten opportunities to advance from them. I salute Mike Scott, Rick Boop, and Rich Ellenbaum, who have all worked within the ABS to carve out a place for our specialty. And I appreciate the hard work of the fine men and women of the ASPN, who advance our specialty and advocate for our field. But in particular, I'm proud of the leadership of our section. It feels a little bit surreal to me that I get to be part of this group, and I'm truly honored by it. I've been honored to work under Rick Abbott, Jeff Wissoff, Tina Duhaime, Al Cohn, Bruce Popman, Sarah Gaskell, all of whom made this section better and more vital each year, and with Grace mentored so many of us. We are in great hands with Matt Smith and Rich Anderson, the current secretary and treasurer of the section, who clearly are our future, and that future is bright. And I'm particularly grateful to Mark Proctor, who preceded me as chair, and Betty Iskender, who's next up. Outstanding leaders and truly great friends, a finer grouping of people you'd never know. We want to help you find mentors and leaders to look to, up to, such as these. Some of my best friends, and the people I like and respect most in the world, I met through this section. There'd be too many to name, but I would like to remember two friends who we lost. Jim Goodrich, one of the most erudite and entertaining men I've ever met, passed away this year of COVID-19. And this is the one-year anniversary of the death of Tim George, one of the best people I've ever met. In his honor, we are promoting a fund that his department has started in his name. Details will be available. For me, the most important goal of this meeting is to help us all connect, to strengthen the community that has pediatric neurosurgery through fostering scientific discovery, supporting career development, and welcoming students, residents, fellows, junior and senior attendings, and advanced practice providers into our field. We hope that we put together a meeting that accomplishes all this and makes this section a vital part of your career. I believe that you are eager to be part of this. We've had over 400 people registered for this meeting and close to 200 scientific submissions, new highs for our section. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for being a part of this. So let's get this going. Here's our schedule. Today, there'll be a main section focusing on neuro-oncology, followed by the first annual Pediatric Neurosurgery Fellow session. There will be a parallel APP session led by experts in the field. Tomorrow, the main session will focus on functional neurosurgery. We are also fortunate to include the American Academy of Pediatric Sexual and Neurological Surgery address by Dr. Sarah Goza, the president of the AAP. There will also be a parallel ongoing abstract call session tomorrow with talks available pre-recorded in the archive, but with live discussions occurring in real time. On Friday, after an abstract session, we'll have a special session addressing timely topics of neurosurgery response to COVID and neurosurgery response to racial injustice. Throughout it all, a novel feature, the remote platform will be a place to connect with speakers after their talks and for informal social connections after the scientific sessions. It will be available throughout the whole course of the meeting for these opportunities to connect. So again, I get to be the pretty face kicking off this meeting, but none of this would have been possible without this hardworking planning committee. They've done a great job and truly deserve our gratitude. They certainly have mine. Please show your appreciation by voting again in this meeting for your favorite session. And I'm extremely grateful for the AANS staff, in particular, Sue Christensen and Sam Luebering, for helping put all this together. They're available during the meeting to help. So here's my contact information. Please reach out and let me know how I can help. I will see you again on the remote platform in three and a half hours. Thank you for your support and enjoy the meeting. Have a great time. Thank you.

49th Annual Meeting

ANS-CNS Section

Pediatric Neurological Surgery

scientific advancements

community of pediatric neurosurgery