Mark Talamini

Mark A. Talamini, MD, is professor and chairman of surgery and chief of surgical services at Stony Brook Medicine; editor-in-chief of Surgical Endoscopy, the official journal of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) and European Association for Endoscopic Surgery; and former president of SAGES.
Dr. Talamini specializes in gastrointestinal surgery, with a particular emphasis on the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (e.g., Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis) and the use of minimally invasive technology to minimize pain and scarring. He is certified by the American Board of Surgery.
With more than 200 publications (see his articles list on PubMed), Dr. Talamini is the editor of Advanced Therapy in Minimally Invasive Surgery (Decker, 2006), an in-depth exploration of new and emerging surgical practices.
Dr. Talamini joined Stony Brook University School of Medicine in 2013 as chairman of the Department of Surgery and founding director of the Stony Brook Medical Innovation Institute. He was appointed chief of surgical services in 2015. In this additional role, Dr. Talamini provides leadership to help coordinate the clinical operations of Stony Brook's surgical and surgically-congruent departments and to stimulate and build their scholarly pursuits.
Long committed to advancing surgery in multiple ways, Dr. Talamini is co-director of Stony Brook's Surgical Outcomes Analysis Research (SOAR) Collaborative established in 2014. Stony Brook SOAR aims to examine quality, delivery, and financing of healthcare in order to improve patient care through system improvements. Its multidisciplinary team investigates diseases treated with surgery, analyzing factors that affect the outcomes, and providing innovative interventions.
In 2008, Dr. Talamini's surgical team at UC San Diego, where he was professor and chairman of surgery from 2005 to mid-2013, gained worldwide attention for pioneering natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES), the practice of removing diseased organs through natural body openings (see references below).
As a leader of the UC San Diego Center for the Future of Surgery, Dr. Talamini's team was the first in the United States to remove an appendix through the mouth.
In partnership with Jacobs School of Engineering and Calit2 at UC San Diego, Dr. Talamini pushed the limits of surgical technology by helping to develop a new surgical camera, called SurgiCam, that boasts auto focus and optical zoom. Designed for NOTES, optical zoom gives surgeons the ability to change the field of view and some peripheral vision.
Prior to UC San Diego, Dr. Talamini was director of minimally invasive surgery at The Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1992 to 2004, where he pioneered new minimally invasive surgical techniques for abdominal diseases. Dr. Talamini was one of the first surgeons at Johns Hopkins to use robot-assisted laparoscopic techniques for general abdominal procedures such as gallbladder removal (cholecystectomy) and treatment of gastroesophageal reflux disease.
A highly respected surgeon, researcher, and teacher, Dr. Talamini is recognized as one of the leading authorities on laparoscopic and robot-assisted surgery in the United States. He advocates for discovery and innovation, and has served as panel chair of the Medical Devices Advisory Committee's Gastroenterology and Urology Devices Panel of the US Food and Drug Administration.