Adrián E. Ortega, MD, FASCRS, and Xavier Delgadillo, MD, EBSQ-C

Scott R. Steele, MD, MBA, FACS, FASCRS

Dr. Adrián E. Ortega is a native Californian born in East Los Angeles in 1959. He graduated from Stanford University with distinction in 1981. He returned home to the LAC + USC Medical Center in 1985 after graduating from Harvard Medical School. He completed his general surgical residency at the University of Southern California (U.S.C.) in 1991, then he joined the faculty at U.S.C. Dr. Ortega was a pioneering surgeon clinically and academically in minimally invasive surgery early in his career. He was a founding member of the Colorectal Surgery Division at his institution in 1992. He completed his colorectal surgery fellowship in 1998 at U.S.C. under the tutelage of Dr. Robert W. Beart.

Dr. Ortega is currently a clinical professor of surgery. He has received numerous awards for teaching excellence at U.S.C. He has made significant contributions in colon and rectal surgery throughout Latin America. He is a past president of the Mexican Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons (2011–2013). Dr. Ortega is currently the standing 26th president of the Latin American Association of Coloproctology (2017–2019).

Dr Xavier Delgadillo, MD, EBSQ-C, was born in La Paz, Bolivia in 1965 to a family of Basque-Spanish origins. He graduated from the American Institute in Cochabamba and from there he continued his studies at the Major University of St. Simon. In 1992, he obtained the medical surgeon diploma with the second highest honor of the university.

He continued his training in general and abdominal surgery at the University Clinics of St. Luc at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and achieved his surgical degree in 1999.

Dr. Delgadillo became a certified proctologist at the University Hospital of Geneva in 2001. He became board certified by the European Society of Coloproctology in 2007. He served as an assistant professor in Brussels and Charleroi (Belgium) as well as in Geneva and La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland).

Dr. Delgadillo was a pioneering surgeon clinically and academically in minimally invasive surgery early in his career. Later, he was appointed as consultant physician at the Proctology Hospital Foundation in Le Locle, Switzerland and in Evangelisches Bielefeld Krankenhaus in Germany.

Dr. Delgadillo was a founding member and head of the Coloproctology Unit at the Clinic Montbrillant in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 2017. He is currently the founder and head of the Specialized Colorectal Unit at Medical Surgical Center Volta in La Chaux-de-Fonds. He is also the founder and scientific director of BioTech Laboratories in Switzerland.

On behalf of the readers of Clinics in Colon and Rectal Surgery, I would like to sincerely thank them for an incredible work on perianal dermatology.