Biography

Paulina Salminen, MD, PhD, FACS (Hon) is a professor of surgery and gastrointestinal surgery at University of Turku and Turku University Hospital in Finland, where she also completed her general surgery and digestive surgery training in 2005 and her PhD in 2007. Since then she has been working at Turku University Hospital with clinical interest mainly focusing on metabolic bariatricsurgery and acute care surgery. She has been a full Professor of Surgery since 2019 with a concurrent Chief of Surgery academic position of at Turku University Hospital. Paulina Salminen is the past president of the Finnish Surgical Society, the current president of the Finnish Society for Bariatric Metabolic Surgery, and past president of both Finnish Digestive Surgeons and Finnish Society of Gastroenterology. She is currently President Elect of the IFSO European Chapter. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Scandinavian Journal of Surgery, an editor of BritishJournal of Surgery (BJS) and a member of the international editorial board of JAMA Surgery. She has been the member of the European Surgical Association (ESA) since 2019. She was nominated as Honorary Fellow of the American College of Surgeons in 2022 (FACS Hon) and Honorary fellow of the American Surgical Association (ASA) in 2024. She has over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications, over 60 scientific book chapters, and 4 edited textbooks. She has supervised 8 completed PhDs and currently she is supervising 14 PhD students. She has received over 4.7 million € of external research funding. She is the PI of 7 multicenter RCTs. Her main current research interests are in the fields of metabolic bariatric surgery with the SLEEVEPASS trial and the SF-BARI Score and acute appendicitis with her APPAC study group. The initial APPAC trial comparing appendectomy with antibiotics for uncomplicated acute appendicitis was selected by JAMA editors as “One in ten articles of the decade 2010 – 19: most important to clinical medicine and public health”.