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Plenary sessions*

The plenary sessions will take place on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings. These large forums welcome everyone and are led by high-profile IR speakers who discuss topics central to the IR and healthcare field. This year's plenary session programming focuses on Interventional Radiology in healthcare and the role of IR as a patient-centered specialty. 


Sunday Opening Plenary Session with Gold Medalists, Leader in Innovation Awards and Dotter Lecture | March 30, 10:30 a.m. - noon

  

Monday Plenary Session: The Power of Interventional Radiologists to shape and lead the Healthcare System | March 31, 11 a.m. - noon

Moderators: Julie Bulman, MD and Michael D. Dake, MD, FSIR

Julie Bulman, MD, RPVI, is an interventional radiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. She is a graduate of Georgetown University School of Medicine, completed residency training in diagnostic radiology at UT Southwestern and Vascular and Interventional Radiology fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Bulman’s clinical interests include venous thromboembolic disease and pelvic venous disorders, and she is an active member of BIDMC’s multidisciplinary PERT team. She is active in the Society of Interventional Radiology as member of the Economics team and Women in IR Governing Council. Her non-clinical interests include health services delivery, economics and coding, and she is the alternate advisor to the AMA CPT Editorial Panel for the Society of Interventional Radiology. She is co-medical director of the BIDMC vascular imaging lab and IR service line lead for Women’s Health interventions.

Michael D. Dake, MD, is Senior Vice President for the University of Arizona Health Sciences. As head of the academic medical center, he directs strategic integration of undergraduate and graduate education, research, service and clinical activities in the University of Arizona Health Sciences colleges, centers, and clinical affiliates. Dr. Dake is a leading researcher, clinician, teacher, and administrator.

He is internationally known for pioneering image-guided therapies and novel approaches in interventional therapy in the fields of vascular imaging, venous thromboembolic disease, aortic aneurysms, and dissection. Dr. Dake made medical history with the implantation of the world’s first thoracic stent-graft in 1992 and his groundbreaking research with CT angiography and stent-grafts has re-written medical and surgery textbooks.

Prior to joining UArizona Health Sciences, he served at Stanford University as Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery and Director of the Catheterization and Angiography Laboratories at Stanford Medical Center. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Baylor College of Medicine.

 

Panelists: Alan H. Matsumoto, MD, FSIR; Robert J. Min, MD, FACR, MBA, FSIR; Ezequiel Silva, MD, FSIR and Alda L. Tam, MD, MBA, FSIR

Tuesday Plenary Session: I owe my Life to IR | April 1, 11 a.m. - noon

Guest speaker: Sebastian Junger, Award-winning journalist, Director, and Best-Selling Author of The Perfect Storm & TRIBE

Sebastian Junger is the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of WAR, The Perfect Storm, A Death in Belmont and Fire. He is also the acclaimed director of the documentary films Restrepo and Korengal. As a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and as a contributor to ABC News, he has covered major international news stories and has been awarded the National Magazine Award and a SAIS Novartis Prize for Journalism.
 
Junger's latest book, In My Time Of Dying, is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery. For years as an award-winning war reporter, Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day and was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived. This experience spurred Junger — a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical — to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions? In My Time Of Dying debuted May 21, 2024.

Don't miss to listen to the KinkedWire episode on From crisis to care: How interventional radiology saved Sebastian Junger's life. The host Warren Krackov, MD, FSIR, speaks with Sebastian Junger, author of In My Time of Dying, The Perfect Storm and more, about his near-death experience with Philip J. Dombrowski, MD, the attending interventional radiologist who saved his life; and with Michael J. Hallisey, MD, FSIR, the IR who first shared the story on SIR Connect. 

Moderators: Merve Ozen, MD and Dan Sze, MD, PhD, FSIR

Merve Ozen, MD is currently practicing at Mayo Clinic Arizona. She received her Doctor of Medicine from Cukurova University School of Medicine in Adana, Turkey, in 2010 and completed her Diagnostic Radiology residency at Baskent University School of Medicine in 2015. She further specialized through fellowships in Vascular and Interventional Radiology, Advanced Vascular & Interventional Radiology, Musculoskeletal Radiology and Neuroradiology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois, from 2016 to 2020. Prior to joining Mayo Clinic, Dr. Ozen worked at the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky.

Her clinical focus encompasses liver and kidney cancer treatments, portal hypertension management, therapies for uterine fibroids and adenomyosis and palliative cancer care.

Dr. Ozen is deeply committed to patient-centered care, pioneering research, and education within the medical community. Beyond her professional work, she enjoys travel, staying active, and learning to fly. She is also a proud pet parent to her cat, Cupid.

Daniel Sze, MD, PhD, Professor, Interventional Radiology, Stanford University Medical Center, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology is double majored in biochemistry and studio arts at Harvard. After a stint as a graphic designer and medical illustrator, he went on to complete an MD and PhD in Biophysics at Stanford, internship at California Pacific Medical Center, residency at UCSF, and fellowship at Stanford, where he joined the faculty. His clinical and research interests include interventional oncology, portal hypertension, venous intervention, and aortic dissections and aneurysms. Since 2020, he has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology, striving to elevate the scientific rigor and quality of the visual presentation.

Panelists: Philip Dombrowski, MD; Michael J. Hallisey, MD, FSIR and Robert J. Lewandowski, MD, FSIR

Wednesday Film Panel Plenary Session: Jeopardy Around the World | April 2, 8:30 - 9:30 a.m.

Moderators: Ziv J Haskal, MD, FSIR and Bart L. Dolmatch, MD, FSIR

We are happy to present the Film Panel Plenary session at SIR 2025. Join us this year for a friendly and educational Jeopardy Around the World on Wednesday, April 2. 

• 3 teams and 15 participants
• 3 rounds and over 21 cases
• a friendly competition to bring education to the audience with cases in a different format

Bart Dolmatch, MD FSIR (Professor Emeritus from UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas) is an interventional radiologist practicing with the Palo Alto Foundation Medical Group in northern California. His clinical expertise spans dialysis access, interventional oncology, peripheral artery and vein disorders, portal hypertension management, urologic and biliary interventions, uterine fibroid embolization, and venous sampling procedures.

He earned his medical degree from Duke University School of Medicine, completed a fellowship in CT/ultrasound/non-vascular interventions at San Francisco General Hospital and a subsequent fellowship in vascular and interventional radiology at the Miami Vascular Institute.

His previous roles included Section Head of Vascular and Interventional Radiology at Cleveland Clinic Foundation and Professor of Vascular and Interventional Radiology and Fellowship Director at UT Southwestern Medical Center. A Fellow of the Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR), he serves as Chair of its Renal and Genitourinary Council, serves on several editorial boards, and is an active medical device consultant.

He has authored over 70 peer-reviewed articles and contributed to more than 25 clinical studies, numerous basic research projects, and many post-graduate courses including the Controversies in Dialysis Access (CiDA) meeting, now in its 21st year.

Ziv J Haskal, MD, FACR, FSIR is a tenured professor and vice chair at the University of Virginia. His research has spanned the breadth of IR, beginning with defining early research in TIPS and complex portal hypertension; his preclinical experimental and human studies led to creation of the TIPS endograft used by the majority of the world. His research has included preclinical validation and in-human interventional trans-arterial gene vector; the first demonstration of IR radiation eye injury risks at occupational levels; trials in accelerated pharmacomechanical deep vein interventions; advances in hemodialysis access care, including the first randomized trials of dialysis stent grafts that defined the first proven superior intervention for AV graft stenosis, benefiting thousands worldwide; liver transplant interventions; all aspects of embolization; and interventional oncology. He has published over 400 manuscripts, abstracts, chapters, books, letters, and editorials in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Human Gene Therapy, Circulation, Hepatology, Radiology, CVIR, AJR, and JVIR. His papers have been cited near 20,000 times – the AHA/ACC PAD Guideline he co-chaired and co-wrote, alone, has been cited over 5300 times. His H-index is 62. Prof. Haskal has led or participated in over 50 human and animal research studies. He has consulted extensively for decades, and continues to, for startups to large companies, from strategy, device design, to trial creation and conduct. He has led multiple PMAs, resulting in devices that are in use in over 80% of the planet.

Prof. Haskal has given more than 700 invited lectures worldwide and been awarded numerous honorary fellowships, named lectures, and received multiple of the highest national and international societal awards for innovation, leadership, service, career and research excellence, gold medals, honorary fellowships, and served in many societal leadership, presidency, and committee roles. Dr. Haskal served as the deputy editor-in-chief of CVIR for five years and doubled its Impact Factor. Thereafter, he served two terms as the JVIR editor-in-chief (10 years) during which he nearly tripled its submissions, raised the impact factor to > 3 and launched its multimedia, social media feeds, blog, editorial fellowship, podcasts, IR virtual reality, and other new topics and features. In those editor roles, he line-edited over 18,000 manuscripts. He has founded, led or designed many national and international scientific congresses, most recently the new SIR EDGE meeting. In nearly 30 years, Prof. Haskal has mentored hundreds of trainees; his ‘Editor’s Writing Club’ seminars have reached over 1000 attendees worldwide.

*Please note that any educational content is subject to change.