Aurora Health Care

Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center | 2900 W Oklahoma Ave | Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53215

Program Director: Wesley Papenfuss, MD, FACS, FSSO

Associate Program Director: Geoffrey Bellini, MD, FACS 

Program Overview

The Aurora Health Care Complex General Surgical Oncology Fellowship is a high-volume, community-based, ACGME-accredited two-year program that accepts one fellow per year through the NRMP match. Established in 2018, initially accredited in 2019 and granted continued accreditation in 2025, the program leads to board eligibility in Complex General Surgical Oncology.

The program is built around a single premise: fellows operate. Aurora St. Luke’s has no general surgery residency, so the fellow is the primary trainee on every case, from initial consultation through operative planning, the operation itself, and long-term follow-up. With two surgical oncology faculty and two fellows, the fellow-to-faculty ratio is 1:1. Fellows exceed the ACGME hepatobiliary/pancreatic minimum within the first year of training and complete the fellowship well beyond the required total oncologic case minimum.

The Institution

Aurora Health Care is the largest health system in Wisconsin, treating more than 10,000 newly diagnosed cancers each year. Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center is the system’s 900-bed quaternary referral center in the heart of Milwaukee, receiving complex oncology referrals from 14 Aurora hospitals across southeastern Wisconsin. Aurora is part of Advocate Health, the third-largest nonprofit integrated health system in the United States, with Wake Forest University School of Medicine as its academic core. Aurora St. Luke’s is ranked the No. 1 hospital in the Milwaukee metro area and No. 2 in Wisconsin by U.S. News & World Report (2026–27).

The surgical platform includes 24 main OR suites, five dedicated robotic suites with da Vinci Xi, DV5 and SP systems and a teaching console, a dedicated thoracic da Vinci Xi, and four ICUs including a 20-bed surgical ICU. St. Luke’s sponsors 21 residency and fellowship programs, including medical oncology, gastroenterology and advanced GI, interventional radiology, critical care, palliative care and abdominal wall reconstruction, giving the surgical oncology fellow a full complement of subspecialty colleagues without competing surgical trainees.

Clinical Volume

The surgical oncology service averages more than 600 major cases per year, including over 70 pancreatic resections, 50 hepatobiliary resections, 55 esophagogastric resections, 60 melanoma cases, 30 sarcoma resections and 35 cytoreductive surgery/HIPEC procedures annually, plus urologic, gynecologic and colorectal oncology cases performed with the fellow with respective services. Fellows gain proficiency in open, laparoscopic and robotic approaches, including robotic pancreatectomy and hepatectomy, and in image-guided tumor ablation including microwave ablation, radiofrequency ablation and histotripsy for liver tumors.

Rotations

The two-year curriculum is organized into 26 four-week blocks:

• Surgical Oncology / HPB: 13 blocks
• Protected research: 4 blocks
• Elective: 3 blocks (urology, thoracic, transplant, gynecologic oncology, or advanced HPB/robotics based on career goals)
• Breast surgical oncology: 2 blocks
• Medical oncology: 1 block
• Radiation oncology/surgical pathology: 1 block
• Colorectal/gynecologic oncology: 1 block
• Endocrine surgery: 1 block

Year One: 6 blocks Surgical Oncology/HPB, 2 blocks breast, 1 block medical oncology, 1 block radiation oncology/pathology, 2 blocks research, 1 block elective.

Year Two: 7 blocks Surgical Oncology/HPB, 1 block colorectal/gynecologic oncology, 1 block endocrine surgery, 2 blocks elective, 2 blocks research.

All rotations take place in Milwaukee.

Programs of Distinction

• National Pancreas Foundation–designated Pancreatic Cancer Center
• Sarcoma Alliance Center of Excellence
• Established cytoreductive surgery and HIPEC program (~35 cases/year)
• Histotripsy program for primary and metastatic liver tumors
• Institutional HIPEC and HPB databases are available to fellows for research

Call

Fellows take weekly pager call from home while on clinical service and share weekend call while on the Surgical Oncology/HPB service. There is no emergency room or general surgery coverage. Fellows are expected to participate in the emergency and follow-up care of their own patients.

Didactics and Conferences

Protected didactics occur Monday afternoons and include a weekly fellows’ education conference, weekly preoperative planning conference, monthly combined surgical oncology/medical oncology case conference, morbidity and mortality conference, and the GI fellows’ conference. Fellows present at multidisciplinary tumor boards in sarcoma/melanoma, metastatic liver disease, complex GI, gynecologic oncology, breast, urology and thoracic oncology. The program follows the Decker curriculum, participates in SSO webinars and virtual tumor boards, and shares a combined didactics calendar with the University of Wisconsin surgical oncology fellowship, the Atrium Health–Wake Forest fellowship and the Aurora medical oncology fellowship.

Research

Fellows have four protected research blocks, free of clinical and call duties. Dedicated support includes a research associate, a biostatistician and a research intern, along with access to the NCDB and institutional HIPEC and HPB databases. Recent fellow projects have included robotic pancreatectomy outcomes, mitomycin dosing in HIPEC, genomic profiling of HPB cancers, NCDB analyses of stage I pancreatic cancer and Choosing Wisely in breast surgery, racial disparities in cancer care, Lutathera outcomes, ovarian HIPEC and multimodal perioperative pain management. Fellows are expected to present at regional and national meetings and receive a $1,000 scholarship for accepted national presentations.

Our Graduates

Six fellows have completed the program since 2020 and are in surgical oncology practice in Milwaukee, WI; Tacoma, WA; Houston, TX; Tulsa, OK; Spokane, WA; and Chattanooga, TN. Our associate program director is a graduate of the program.

Eligibility and Application

The program participates in the NRMP Complex General Surgical Oncology match and accepts applications through ERAS. Applicants must have satisfactorily completed a general surgery residency accredited by the ACGME or by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and be certified by or admissible to examination by the American Board of Surgery.

Contact Information