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Controversies in Dialysis Access (CiDA) Sym 2025 Main banner

Karl A. Illig, MD

Chief Medical Officer
FLOW Vascular Institute
Houston, TX, United States

Dr. Karl Illig (Chief Medical Officer, FLOW Vascular Institute) attended Harvard followed by Cornell Medical College in New York, graduating AOA in 1988. He completed his general surgical residency, research fellowship, and vascular surgical fellowship at the University of Rochester, joining the faculty there in 1997. He served as Program Director and Division Chief in Rochester until 2011, followed by seven years as Director of the Division of Vascular Surgery and Associate Chair for Faculty Development and Mentoring at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Because of his increasing clinical and academic focus on dialysis access, he relocated to the Dialysis Access Institute in Orangeburg, SC, then the busiest such center in the world, in 2018. He now practices at FLOW Vascular Institute in Houston where he serves as Chief Medical Officer and Director of Research and Education.

Dr. Illig’s clinical practice is now exclusively devoted to arteriovenous access and venous thoracic outlet syndrome in dialysis patients. He has published over 120 peer-reviewed manuscripts, 55 chapters, multiple invited reviews and commentaries, and three books, including two editions of the definitive multi-author textbook on thoracic outlet syndrome. He’s one of the developers of the concept that the venous thoracic outlet plays a role in many patients with AV access dysfunction, and has surgically treated over 100 people with this condition. He’s an Academic Fellow of the Society for Vascular Surgery, a member of the American Surgical Association, and served on the Vascular Surgery Board of the ABS, where he has been a senior board examiner for the past 13 years. Current research efforts are focused on the hemodynamics of dialysis access and focused comprehensive dialysis access education.He is the editor-in-chief of Principles of Dialysis Access, a multi-author, multi-specialty comprehensive textbook of dialysis access (Springer).

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