Announcing the 2019 Department of Surgery Outstanding Citizenship Award Recipients

The Department of Surgery Outstanding Citizenship Award is given annually to two faculty members who exemplify an unwavering dedication to the department, their colleagues and the Brigham community. This years recipients are Robert Riviello, MD, MPH and Jennifer Shin, MD, SM.


Robert Riviello, MD, MPH
Associate Surgeon, Division of Trauma, Burn, Surgical & Critical Care, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Director of Global Surgery Programs, Center for Surgery and Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Assistant Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School
Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Robert Riviello, MD, MPH, is an associate surgeon in the Division of Trauma, Burn, Surgical & Critical Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and serves as director of Global Surgery for the BWH Center for Surgery and Public Health (CSPH).

He received his medical degree from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Riviello completed a General Surgery Residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, TN and was a Fulbright International Fellow in Global Surgery at Centro Evangelico de Medicina in Lubango, Angola. He completed both an Acute Care and Burn Surgery Fellowship and Surgical Critical Care Fellowship at BWH.

Dr. Riviello has dedicated his career to improving surgical access for vulnerable people. Over the past decade he has split his time between BWH and sub-Saharan Africa, strengthening surgical services, surgical training programs, surgical device innovation, and providing mentorship to the CSPH’s global surgery fellows. His clinical and research interests are in global health, specifically the reduction of disparities and the expansion of surgical delivery for low-income populations by developing surgical workforce and surgical infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa.


Jennifer J. Shin, MD, SM
Associate Surgeon, Division of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Associate Chair for Faculty Development, Department of Surgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Associate Professor of Otolaryngology, Harvard Medical School
Vice Chair, Academic Affairs at Longwood, Department of Otolaryngology, Harvard Medical School

Jennifer J. Shin, MD, SM, is a graduate of Harvard Radcliffe College and Harvard Medical School. She completed her residency and fellowship training in the Harvard Program, and was a fellow of the National Institutes of Health and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She also holds a degree in epidemiology from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Shin has a longstanding interest in evidence-based practice and has served as chair of the Outcomes Research and Evidence-Based Medicine Leadership Group for the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation. She also served as co-chair of the expert panel convened by the academy to develop their national clinical consensus statement on pediatric chronic rhinosinusitis, and she served as vice chair of the clinical practice guideline on otitis media with effusion, a multidisciplinary effort supported by the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and the American Academy of Pediatrics. She also chairs one of the specialty’s seven clinical advisory committees, which are cooperative endeavors encompassing the American Board of Otolaryngology, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and subspecialty societies such as the American Laryngological Association and the American Neurotology Society. Dr. Shin also serves as the deputy editor for Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, one of the main journals in the field.

Her first book, Evidence-Based Otolaryngology (2008), was among the publisher’s most accessed works and has had over 55,000 accessions.