Biography

Dr. Ann DeBord Smith is the Director of Bariatric Surgery at VA Boston where she manages the Bariatric Program for VISN 1. She obtained her undergraduate degree in computer science from Dartmouth College before continuing in medical school at the University of Chicago. There she won the Alpha Omega Alpha award for her research using Markov models to study renal transplantation distribution. She completed her residency in General Surgery at Harvard’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital. During that time she also completed her Masters in Public Health at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health with a focus in Quantitative Methods. She completed her fellowship in Bariatric and Minimally Invasive Surgery at the University of Massachusetts before joining VA Boston. At VA Boston she has dedicated time to raising the profile of Bariatric Surgery among Veterans and Primary Care providers. Her Podcast on the topic is distributed on the VA You Tube Channel and her current research interests are qualitative studies of obese veterans and their perception of Bariatric Surgery. She also studies medical management of post-operative weight regain among Bariatric Surgery patients and the use of semaglutide to treat this. Her lectures on Bariatric Surgery can be found on the VA You Tube channel (Weight Loss with Bariatric Surgery | Sleeve Gastrectomy & Gastric Bypass | theSITREP – YouTube) and on TMS on-demand listed as “Bariatric Surgery-Current Bariatric Programs and Protocols to Address Obesity in the Veteran Population.”