My question is, what is the difference between academic surgery position and faculty surgery position. I know you can't be attending till you done from residnecy, fellowship +/- subspeciality fellowship and get ABS.
Thank you
1) "by "get ABS" I assume you mean to be Board Certified. You are not required to be BC to be an attending; as a matter of fact, many foreign trained physicians are not eligible for US BC, but can get employed with an institutional medical license.
2) it appears to me that you are making more of the semantics than there needs to be. An academic medical center is one which has teaching programs: residencies and/or medical school. Faculty employed may have academic appointments in which they are charged with teaching medical students and/or residents/fellows as part of their job. Some may not and are either involved only in doing research or are not on the "teaching service". The latter is more common for administrative positions (ie, the department Chair) and non-surgical departments.
So in essence, most surgical department faculty are employed in an academic track with a few exceptions.
Outside of academic medical centers/hospitals, surgeons are typically not employed by a hospital (although there are some in employed positions with insurance companies/HMOs/VAs). There is no "department" of surgery, no faculty.
The latter typically does not require research. Academic medical positions may require a varying amount of research. Surgeons doing research don't bring in money unless they have a big grant or bring in prestige, and by that, patients; they bring in money when they operate. So unless you have a T1 grant or other funding source, you are expected to spend most of your time in clinical duties and a certain percentage either teaching and/or running a lab. Some academic surgeons only do clinical work and have no lab or research activities required. YMMV. Whether you do basic science, translational or clinical research is up to you - surgeons participate in all venues.
If you are interested in research, I would not worry about getting substantial work done during medical school (it is a bit confusing because you talk about starting residency but your status already lists you as a resident). Many academic surgery residencies will provide, indeed even require, 2 years or more in the research lab, during which time you can get published (or at the very least submit something).
If you are a student wanting to get more research done and published before residency, bear in mind that it does take a few years to do so. More is not necessarily better. If you are already working on some basic science research that has the potential to be published, it may be faster than quitting and starting all over from scratch with a clinical research project.
