Biography

Dr. Neil Floch is a board-certified general surgeon and a fellow of the American College of Surgeons. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Tufts University in 1988. He obtained his medical education from the Boston University School of Medicine in 1992. He completed his residency in general surgery at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City in 1997. He completed a fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida studying under his mentor: Dr. Ronald Hinder, a forefather of the laparoscopic Nissen Fundoplication. In his one fellowship year at the Mayo Clinic, he authored 17 papers and 3 book chapters.

With his brother Craig Floch, he established a private practice in Norwalk Connecticut: Fairfield County Bariatrics P.C. which grew to 5 surgeons covering 5 hospitals and two ambulatory surgical centers. His group participated in multiple prospective trials for the Lap-Band. Dr. Floch started his career in advanced laparoscopic surgery with a specialization in foregut surgery. In 2002, he spent time with Dr. Raul Rosenthal and learned about the laparoscopic gastric bypass. In 2003, he was trained in gastric banding surgery. Trained in 2017, He began to perform Robotic surgery in 2020 regularly.

Over 24 years, he has performed over 600 laparoscopic foregut surgeries and over 2500 laparoscopic bariatric surgeries. In 2006, he started the Centers of Excellence at Norwalk Hospital and helped develop the center at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Connecticut. In 2014 Craig and Neil Floch financed the start of the ASMBS Connecticut chapter.

Neil Floch served as President of the ASMBS Connecticut chapter from 2017 to 2018. Starting in 2018 and repeated in 2019 and 2020, he developed the event, and speaker program acquired financing, and promoted “The Connecticut Obesity Summit” at Foxwoods, a two-day event for surgeons, bariatrician, and allied health in New England.

In 2013 he had the vision to use social media and especially Twitter to communicate, collaborate, and educate the public and physicians concerning obesity. Over the past decade, he has become an international obesity influencer with over 130,00 followers on Twitter and participates in many other social media applications.

He became Co-Chairman of The ASMBS Communications Committee in 2017-2019 and Chairman from 2019 to 2022. He is the social media Co-editor of SOARD. He was appointed to the Executive Board of The National ASMBS Foundation in 2019 and now serves as their communications committee chairman. He has lectured at live and virtual meetings across four continents on topics related to communications, social media, and surgery.

Dr. Floch has authored 24 journal articles. He has authored seven book chapters including being an author and co-editor of Netter’s Gastroenterology which is an international best-selling book written in 6 languages.

He left private practice in 2020 and joined Nuvance Health, Norwalk Hospital as Head of the section of General Surgery and Director of Bariatric Surgery.

In May of 2023, he joined Yale Medicine Department of Surgery as an Associate Professor and was appointed Director of Bariatric Surgery at Greenwich Hospital.