President & Chief Executive Officer
The American Board of Surgery
Dr. Jo Buyske is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Board of Surgery (ABS). She has served the ABS since 1998, first as a volunteer item writer and oral examiner, later as a director, and finally been part of the executive staff since 2008 and CEO since 2017. Her portfolio of work has focused on increasing the relevance and validity of board certification, as well as making the years of training more flexible. In order to make effective changes she led a redesign of both the governance structure and the organizational structure, with a guiding principle of making the highest and best use of the skills and time of the volunteers across the leadership spectrum. Major initiatives included moving away from representational governance to a competency based nominating process, of a fiduciary governing board, and the creation of the general surgery board as an individual entity.
This new structure facilitated meaningful change in board certification. Allowing greater flexibility in training in terms of both time in training and required experience in training created space for a more humane and career focused experience for trainees. The institution of EPA’s and competency-based assessment, still in its infancy, has provided more frequent and consistent feedback to trainees, allowing them to advance according to their skills while simultaneously fulfilling our public trust by assessing actual on the job skills. Lifelong certification moved from point in time to continuous, with more frequent assessments with feedback, free references, and modular exams, responding to longstanding concerns from diplomates about being tested on things they don’t do, as well as complaints from other stakeholders that the assessments did not adequately reflect the rapid pace of medical change.
Dr. Buyske has had a career-long focus on equitable access to surgical care around the globe. To that end she has been a director of ABMS-International, ACGME-International, a founding partner in the G6 Alliance, and an instructor and examiner for COSECSA (the College of Surgeons of Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa). She worked with the Ministry of Health in Haiti to develop a new paradigm for surgical training in partnership with Partners in Health and Zanmi Lasante and was instrumental in getting ACGME-I accreditation for the main teaching hospital there. Locally she is on the Advisory Council for the Center for Surgical Health, a student-run outreach program in Philadelphia that facilitates access to surgical care for vulnerable populations.
Dr. Buyske has given well over 100 invited and named lectureships, as well as being a prolific author primarily in the areas of surgical education and standards.
Dr Buyske’s personal hobbies include long distance running, working as a therapy dog handler with her dog Willow, farm to table cooking and dining, and reading good books. She is a veteran of over 24 marathons and would be pleased to make recommendations for dining if you come to Philadelphia.
Thursday, March 5, 2026
8:15 AM - 8:50 AM MST