Charles M. Vollmer, Jr, MD
Kay Senior Fellow in Medical Education
Assistant Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School
Surgeon, Department of Surgery, BIDMC
Fellowship Project:
Creation of A Novel Curriculum for a Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Surgery Fellowship
Charles M. Vollmer, Jr., MD is an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School with a busy clinical practice in Pancreaticobiliary Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Dr. Vollmer is a native of Philadelphia where he received a medical degree from Jefferson Medical College after graduating with a degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his general surgery training at the Barnes-Jewish Hospital of Washington University of St. Louis from 1994-2001. During that seven-year period, he spent two years in a translational surgical research laboratory at UCLA, where he studied cutting-edge immunotherapy and gene therapy approaches to hepatocellular cancer. While at Washington University, he was awarded Alpha Omega Alpha status, and won numerous teaching awards through the medical school. He then matriculated into the internationally acclaimed clinical fellowship program in Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Surgery and Solid Organ Transplantation at the University of Toronto, followed by an additional year of research at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute where he studied the genetics of inherited pancreatic cancer. As a faculty member at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, he performs clinical outcomes research in high-acuity surgical procedures.
As a Rabkin Fellow, Dr. Vollmer was named the Kay Senior Fellow in Medical Education, and concentrated on designing a novel fellowship training curriculum for his field of clinical expertise - Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary (HPB) surgery. The design integrates education in all facets of multidisciplinary surgical care, with a focus on core-competency training and evaluation. It is anticipated that this model will serve as a foundation for development of a standardized HPB fellowship at the national and international levels. In addition, Dr. Vollmer is actively engaged in medical education endeavors at the undergraduate, graduate and professional development levels at BIDMC, where he serves as the Department of Surgery's Education Resource Faculty Member. He is also the founding faculty advisor for the John Warren Surgical Society at Harvard Medical School, and has been nominated for the Prize for Excellence in Teaching (Years 3 & 4) in 2005, the AAMC National Humanism in Medicine Award, as well as the Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2007.
