Dr. Illig attended Harvard followed by Cornell Medical College in New York, graduating AOA in 1988. He completed his general surgical residency, research fellowship, and vascular surgical fellowship at the University of Rochester, joining the faculty there in 1997. He served as Program Director and Division Chief in Rochester until 2011, followed by seven years as Director of the Division of Vascular Surgery and Associate Chair for Faculty Development and Mentoring at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Because of his increasing clinical and academic focus on dialysis access, he relocated to the Dialysis Access Institute in Orangeburg, SC, then the busiest such center in the world, in 2018. He now practices at FLOW Vascular Institute in Houston where he serves as Chief Medical Officer and Director of Research and Education. Dr. Illig’s clinical practice is now exclusively devoted to arteriovenous access and venous thoracic outlet syndrome in dialysis patients. He has published over 120 peer-reviewed manuscripts, 55 chapters, multiple invited reviews and commentaries, and three books, including two editions of the definitive multi-author textbook on thoracic outlet syndrome. He’s one of the developers of the concept that the venous thoracic outlet plays a role in many patients with AV access dysfunction, and has surgically treated over 100 people with this condition, a procedure that is increasingly being performed elsewhere in the world. He’s an Academic Fellow of the Society for Vascular Surgery, a member of the American Surgical Association, and served on the Vascular Surgery Board of the ABS, where he has been a senior board examiner for the past 12 years. Current research efforts are focused on the hemodynamics of dialysis access and focused comprehensive dialysis access education.Dr. Scher attended college at Brandeis University and received his MD degree from The Medical College of Wisconsin. He completed his general surgery residency under Dr. Lazar Greenfield at the Medical College of Virginia and a vascular surgery fellowship at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. He has served at Chief of the Division of Vascular Surgery at North Shore University Hospital and is currently an attending vascular surgeon at Montefiore Medical Center and Professor of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He was a founding member and former Vice President of the Vascular Access Society of the Americas. He is a past president of the New York Society for Vascular Surgery and a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a member of the Society for Vascular Surgery, the Society for Clinical Vascular Surgery and the Eastern Vascular Society. Dr. Scher has a had long-standing interest in hemodialysis access and has lectured extensively at regional, national and international meetings. He is the author or coauthor of over 100 publications in peer review journals, author of a chapter on Hemodialysis Access Related Distal Ischemia in UpToDate, author of a chapter on Ischemic Monomelic Neuropathy in Wilson’s Textbook of Vascular Access and author of a chapter on Complex Hemodialysis Access in the upcoming 11th edition of Rutherford’s Vascular Surgery and Endovascular Therapy. He has also been the chairman of ‘Improving Outcomes in Hemodialysis Access’, a symposium dedicated to Hemodialysis Access which is a component of the annual VEITH Symposium highlighting new and important topics in the management of vascular disease. Dr. Scher continues to have strong clinical and academic interests in the field of hemodialysis accessDr. John Ross is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in vascular access. Following his training in general surgery at the Medical University of South Carolina, Dr. Ross dedicated his practice to treating ESRD patients. He was a founding member of the Vascular Access Society of the Americas and was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology (ASDIN). Dr. Ross is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, ASDIN and MAMSE (Member of the Academy of Master Surgeon Educators).Dr. Ross has served as the PI on numerous industry trials, spoken at dozens of medical meetings around the world and has published on a wide variety of topics related to vascular access. In 2011, Dr. Ross founded the Dialysis Access Institute (DAI) in Orangeburg, SC. This one-of-a-kind facility serves as a model for patient-oriented care and hosts training for physicians, staff and administrators on a routine basis.
