At the 2022 AANS Annual Scientific Meeting in Philadelphia this past April, Women in Neurosurgery (WINS) held its annual AANS WINS Breakfast. featuring Esther Duflo, PhD, and the 2022 Louise Eisenhardt Lecturer. Guests included graduate and medical students, residents, attendings and outgoing AANS president, Dr. Regis Haid, Jr. and his daughters, outgoing WINS chair, Ellen Air, and the current WINS chair, Dr. Sarah Woodrow. The room was lively and at-capacity, and guests were treated to breakfast.
Dr. Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also the co-director and co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab where she researches approaches to alleviating global poverty including evaluation and design of social policies. In 2019. Dr. Duflo was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside co-laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer for their collective work in fighting global poverty. Dr. Ellen Air moderated the discussion with intersectional questions about her work and how it applies to professionalism, diversity and equity in neurosurgery. The conversation focused on how women in neurosurgery can be professional advocates for themselves, their patients, coworkers and the world at large. Dr. Duflo thoughtfully correlated her work with challenges in our field, delivering actionable and insightful advice to the audience. Her research involving a policy experiment in India provided evidence that when females occupy leadership positions, the aspirational interests of those young females, and their pursuits in that field, increased. This supports and further motivates the dedication of WINS to support and foster female leadership in neurosurgery.
Dr. Duflo’s life and work honors the memory of Louise Eisenhardt, the namesake of the annual WINS Breakfast lecture. Among other achievements, Louis Eisenhardt was the first female president of the American Association of Neurological. We are excited to continue the legacy of AANS leadership by welcoming Dr. Stroink as AANS president, and look forward to a year of exciting WINS events including the next WINS Breakfast at the 2023 AANS Annual Scientific Meeting in Los Angeles in April 2023.
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