What does retirement look like after a long career as one of the country’s leading endoscopists? For Jerome D. Waye, MD, it looks like an opportunity to broaden the scope, so to speak, by expanding international instruction to any place that has high-speed internet access, beginning with a small village in Uganda.
Waye, 88, an emeritus professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City, esteemed by colleagues and GI societies for pioneering techniques in colonoscopy and for his unflagging enthusiasm, retired at the end of 2019. But retirement just meant more time to pursue projects he’s passionate about, and that may have far-reaching implications for endoscopic instruction.
In early February 2020, after visiting a center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city, where he’d been directing endoscopy courses for the past few years, Waye went to the Mount Sinai Kyabirwa Surgical Centre in Uganda, to teach endoscopy.