In January Blake Beneville, MD, an education fellow at the Washington University Institute for Surgical Education (WISE), and Michael Awad, MD, PhD, MPHE, director of WISE, received the 2025 SAGES (Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons) Robotic Research Grant Award by the SAGES Research and Career Development Committee and the SAGES Board of Governors. The grant will fund two years of research.
SAGES has historically held a policy encouraging young investigators in hopes that funding through SAGES will lead to additional extramural funding. SAGES considers a young investigator as someone who has not participated in surgery independently for more than five years.
The grant awards $50,000 for the project named “Automated Robotic Surgery Operative Performance Reports: Towards the Holy Grail of Ideal Assessment in Surgical Training.” Beneville was the primary author of the grant for this project, which seeks to build upon work previously explored by Awad and previous WISE education fellows.
“Dr. Awad has been such an impactful mentor to me and previous fellows,” says Beneville. “I wanted to continue building on their work thus far and really push the boundaries of how we can leverage advanced technology already available to us to improve surgical training. A grant like this is exactly what we need to help us get there.”
Awad has several academic appointments within the Department of Surgery, including program director of the minimally invasive surgery fellowship, director of the WISE simulation fellowship, as well as being director of WISE. He is also the Immediate-Past President of the Association for Surgical Educators (ASE) and director of robotic surgery at BJC HealthCare. His mentorship has been paramount in the establishment and further development of WISE.
Traditionally, surgical trainees receive feedback based on an attending surgeon’s observations, which can be infrequent, delayed, and subjective. To address these limitations, this study will explore the use of artificial intelligence and robotic surgery data to create automated operative performance reports (OPRs). These reports combine real-time robotic data—such as time spent actively controlling the robotic instruments—with natural language processing, a type of AI that analyzes verbal feedback from attending surgeons.
By blending these two technologies, Beneville and Awad aim to provide more frequent, objective and detailed feedback to surgical trainees: the ‘Holy Grail’ of performance feedback. The goal is to help residents refine their skills more efficiently, gain confidence in performing procedures, and ultimately become more independent in the operating room.
Awad and Beneville will be presented with this acknowledgment at the SAGES Foundation Lunch at the SAGES Annual Meeting in Long Beach, California in March.