President’s Message

SATA – Ever Innovative, Inclusive, and Fiercely Active!

President’s Message

I am humbled to introduce myself to you as the new President of the Society for the Advancement of Transplant Anesthesia (SATA) for the upcoming two years starting on August 1, 2021. 

SATA was brought to life in 2011 by Dr. Ernest Pretto, Jr. as an independent, clinician-based, professional association serving the needs of anesthesiologists and critical care specialists involved in the practice of transplantation medicine and surgery. Dr. Pretto keenly identified the crucial need for such a transplant anesthesiology society in North America. We could not appreciate enough his innovative vision and forward thinking. As the founding president of SATA, Dr. Pretto established the society for us to congregate and unite. Then in 2016, Dr. M. Susan Mandell assumed the role as SATA’s second president. Dr. Mandell transformed the society into the SATA we know now. With her sheer drive and passion, SATA matured into an international society. Dr. Mandell achieved so much, including establishing the SATA bylaws, re-confirming SATA’s identity as a transplant anesthesiology society by selecting Clinical Transplantation as our new home journal, creating various committees and working groups and appointing new leaders from among SATA’s members, revamping the SATA website, and establishing international collaborations with transplant anesthesia societies in South Korea, Mexico, India, and Russia. Under her strong leadership, SATA flourished, and its membership has quadrupled over the last five years. 

With continuing support from these two past presidents, Dr. Pretto as the Founding President and Dr. Mandell as the Immediate Past President, I am incredibly pleased to work closely with the new SATA Council members Gebhard Wagener, MD (President-Elect: Columbia University), Lorenzo De Marchi, MD (Secretary: Georgetown University), and Jiapeng Huang, MD, PhD (Treasurer: University of Louisville), as well as Executive Councilors Ranjit Deshpande, MD (Yale University), Adrian Hendrickse, BM, FRCA (University of Colorado), Christine Nguyen-Buckley, MD (UCLA), and Ramona Nicolau-Raducu, MD, PhD (University of Miami). 

SATA is an inclusive transplant anesthesiology and critical care society whose members consist of specialists from both abdominal and thoracic transplant anesthesiology and critical care physicians from both the adult and pediatric fields. This unique composition positions SATA as the unified voice of anesthesiologists and critical care physicians among multidisciplinary transplantation specialists. We will continue to provide practice guidelines, be vocal in policy statements, offer educational materials, and generate novel research findings. Thus, we will keep contributing to the transplant community for the best care of patients undergoing lifesaving transplantation procedures. 

SATA should be a fiercely active society. There are so many things to be done and so many projects to be completed. My vision is for SATA to reach out to all transplant anesthesia directors and transplant anesthesiology members and get them involved; widen the network of our regional meetings to all states in the US and Canada; establish educational modules for trainees and offer TEE/POCUS training programs and certifications; strengthen our existing international relationships and extend our international outreach; offer a visiting fellowship program for national and international trainees; and become the ideal platform for multi-institutional research projects and offer a competitive research grant. 

As your President, I commit to achieving these goals. To do so, I need your participation. SATA needs you to get involved in projects, join committees, and seek leadership opportunities in the society. 

We will be stronger by collective force. 

Sincerely, 

     
Tetsuro Sakai, MD, PhD, MHA, FASA

SATA President