Dr. Elliot Fishman Receives Radiology Lifetime Achievement Award From Diagnostic Imaging
It’s been a big year for ISCT faculty. From the Minnies to department recognitions, we’ve been lucky enough to see several of our faculty members recognized for their incredible career contributions to the radiology world in 2016. Although the year is almost over, the awards just keep on coming!
This week we were thrilled to see that Dr. Elliot Fishman was selected as the recipient of Diagnostic Imaging’s Radiology Lifetime Achievement Award. Although it’s not uncommon to see peers recognized by various awards throughout the year, this one is special because it’s indicative of the enthusiasm, innovation, and excellence that Dr. Fishman has contributed to his work in radiology not just in one particular area or at one particular moment in time, but over the span of his extensive career.
DI sat down with Dr. Fishman to discuss some of the career accomplishments he’d had over the years, as well as what the future holds for him and radiology. If you want to read the whole thing you can do so here on their site, but these are some of the Q&A’s we really loved from their interview.
DI: What has been your greatest accomplishment throughout your career?
Fishman: My greatest accomplishment is that I’ve tried to maintain a standard of excellence throughout my career, as well as an interest in learning new things and moving forward. That hasn’t changed. I’ve maintained that curiosity and continued to improve.
DI: What would you consider to be your biggest challenge?
Fishman: The biggest challenge has been not to rest on my laurels. As you become senior faculty, you have to maintain a lot of things that made you very good as junior faculty. You need to work hard, and that doesn’t change with time. There’s a great tendency in people as they become more senior to take advantage of that seniority. It’s wonderful, but there are key things you must do – you need to keep starting anew and re-discovering things. In academia, you have to keep up with the reading and you have to be at the front end of leading, discovering, and research. There’s a human tendency to rest on your laurels. People can sit back and glide, and the challenge is to not do that and keep moving forward.
DI: What is something you would like to see happen in the next 10 years?
Fishman: If you look, the challenge will be – with decreasing dollars and increasing workloads – to manage the combination of the need for more education and training with research and clinical care. How are we going to manage the tripartite mission? How will you do that in an era when clinical workload is becoming overwhelming? How will you manage to do all that? I think that’s the challenge of academia. In private practice, providers will work harder by reading more. But, in academic, we’re supposed to be discovering and training the residents. That’s what the challenge is going to be for us.
We couldn’t be more proud of Dr. Fishman. His dedication towards improving our industry is inspiring, and it’s because of the countless other motivated radiologists like him that our field is continuing to thrive and evolve. Don’t miss a chance to toss ideas around with him and so many of our other bright faculty at the ISCT 2017 CT symposium!