Well, good morning, everyone. Good morning. What a great group we have here. I'm Dr. Bill Tierney. And it is my pleasure to serve as your course director for this custom ARIA course for Santa Fe. We are really privileged to have you all here. This is going to be, as you can see, the house is packed, as they say. We actually have an overflow area, just in case anybody wants to spread out, that's in the areas where you just had breakfast. All of the material you see here will be broadcast there. And there is the opportunity to ask questions from that venue. Again, option for you if you wish to spread out. Just some housekeeping issues. ASG is trying to promote health. So if you feel inclined to, please feel free to wear your mask while we're in this room. Obviously, when we're dining in other areas, that's really not possible or required. I want to give you just a global overview of the course. There's really six learning experiences that you will have during the next two days. You're going to go through a whole curriculum that a gastroenterology fellow takes three years to go through. So get ready to get bombarded with information. The first learning experience is we're going to give you a global overview of digestive diseases, both in terms of the normal physiology and anatomy of the digestive tract, as well as some of the common diseases that we see as gastroenterologists. Second, you're going to have a custom curriculum on eosinophilic esophagitis, because that's obviously the disease that you are interested in as a person that's going to be interacting with health care professionals. Third, we're going to give you an overview and an introduction to the practice of gastrointestinal endoscopy. And actually, if you want, get your hands on an endoscope in our Bioskills lab and see how much fun it is to do gastrointestinal endoscopy. Fourth, we're going to have a series of panel discussions and interactive case discussions where you can really get into the weeds of what it's like to be a gastroenterologist and also what it's like to be in the field and decision making. We go through when we're caring for patients with digestive diseases. We are also going to have a unique gamification. There'll be a competition among 105 of you to see who's picked up some of the knowledge points that we'll be displaying to you during the course of the next two days. And then lastly, we're going to have a very unique look into the life of a patient with eosinophilic esophagitis at a patient experience session that will be part of the breakouts that we do tomorrow. So I am pleased to introduce to you the wonderful faculty that we have gathered to put on this program. Again, I'm Dr. Bill Tierney. I'm at the University of Oklahoma Health Science Center. I'll be your course director. Dr. Ayo Abagunde, many of you will meet in the bioskill session, is from Loyola University. Dr. Tasif Ali is the director of inflammatory bowel disease and gastroenterology at SSM in Oklahoma City and is a long-term colleague of mine. Dr. Steve Carpenter is in large community practice in United Digestive in Savannah, Georgia. Dr. Gary Falk, who will be here hopefully later today, his plane got delayed last night. But Gary is at the University of Pennsylvania. He's a professor there and is a longtime expert in esophageal diseases and past ASGE president. Dr. Nirmala Gonsalves is a professor of gastroenterology at Northwestern University and co-director of their eosinophilic disease program at Northwestern. Dr. Femi Qasim is also at Loyola University and she is here this morning, and many of you will be meeting with her in the bioskills sessions later today and also tomorrow. Dr. Jennifer Lightdale is chief of pediatric gastroenterology at UMass Medical Center in Worcester, Mass., and is a director of that section and professor at UMass Medical Center. And Dr. John Martin, who is from Mayo Clinic and is part of their advanced endoscopy group there. John has been a leader within ASGE and is a wonderful educator, as you'll see. Dr. Sophia Solaria will be joining us virtually tomorrow. She is the chief of gastrointestinal pathology at Vanderbilt University and will be sharing with us a pathologist perspective of EOE. And last, but certainly not least, Dr. Karen Woods is from Houston Methodist Gastroenterology Associates in Houston, Texas, and has a very broad practice in gastroenterology and is also a past president of the American Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. So what is ARIA, and why are you here? Really, ASGE and industry have been working together for some time in a lot of collaborative projects, including research to bring new products to market, and most importantly, to educate gastroenterologists and their teams about new products, including pharmaceutical agents and devices. And the mission behind ARIA is several fold, and that is to take advantage of our strength as an educational society, to educate you as industry representatives, as well as our colleagues in gastroenterology, and to really foster those relationships, those collaborative relationships. And the ultimate goal is really to improve the healthcare of our patients. Yeah, okay, I'm pleased to introduce our current president of the American Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, Dr. Brett Peterson. Welcome, Brett. Thank you. Oh, we're really excited to have this group here. I think I understand this is the largest ARIA program we've put on, and I think you have spectacular faculty, including one of my colleagues from Rochester, Minnesota, John Martin, somewhere in the audience here. Bill's done a great job with this program over the last several years, and has succeeded another chair who really got this established quite nicely. I hope you find it valuable. I hope your company finds it valuable so that we can sustain these. We've done these in customized fashions and in general fashions, and I think the opportunity to get across the hall into a bioskills lab will be a highlight, I hope, for you, as well as some of the games you'll play in the course of the day. But please feel very welcome here. We're delighted to have you here, and thank you for joining us. Thanks, Brett. I want to join Brett in really congratulating, or thanking all of you to take the time to invest in your professional development, and to specifically thank your leaders in Santa Fe that have really, or Sanofi, that have really gone the extra distance to ensure that you have the opportunity to put yourself in position to be optimally effective when you go into the field and interact with healthcare professionals. So some other logistics before we get into the lectures. You will see on your name tags that you have a group A and a group B. For this afternoon, you will be split into group A and group B. You'll see that on your agenda for the course. One group will be staying here and listening to some EOE-specific lectures, and the other group will be going to the Bioskills Lab to get your hands on an endoscope and really see what the practice of gastrointestinal endoscopy is all about. Tomorrow, you will reverse those experiences between the two groups. The other thing you'll notice on your name tag is a color badge, and that color badge will direct you to your group activity when we have breakout sessions, and that'll be tomorrow morning. Different colors will rotate among the three experiences that we do tomorrow morning, that includes a case-based discussion on dysphagia, a pediatric case discussion, and then the patient experience that I mentioned earlier. We have really a wonderful group of faculty that will be bringing you a diverse perspective, both in terms of where they practice, the setting they practice in, the type of practice, what kind of patients they see, and also each of the faculty may have their own specialty that they focus on, including a pathologist and a pediatric gastroenterologist and a lot of general gastroenterologists. We have eight faculty that'll be here on staff and on site, two faculty that will be here dedicated for the bioskill sessions in the afternoon, and then we have one virtual faculty member that'll be joining us, that's Dr. Solorio. Okay, any other logistic issues? Okay, I think we're good to go. Without further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce our first speaker, and that is Dr. Lightdale, who will be talking to us about the basic anatomy and physiology of the esophagus and stomach. Jennifer, welcome.

ARIA course

digestive diseases

gastroenterology

learning experiences

eosinophilic esophagitis