He was born in 1985 in Diyarbakır to a surgeon father and an English teacher mother. His father, Dr Ekrem Ersöz, was a urology specialist who served as chief physician at Diyarbakır State Hospital for many years. He must have set a very good example for himself, because Hasan Hodja had set his mind not only to be a doctor but also a surgeon since his childhood. After completing primary and secondary school in Diyarbakır, he passed the science high school exams and graduated from Çanakkale Science High School in his mother's hometown.
Afterwards, due to the special situation of his family, he returned to his hometown by winning Dicle University Faculty of Medicine with the score that could win Hacettepe Medicine in the university entrance exam. The last year of his 6-year medical education coincided with the period when his father started to experience lung disease. For this reason, he was interested in becoming a Thoracic Surgeon with an idealistic approach, to be the best in this business. Although he got a high score in the first TUS he entered, he preferred this department, which was generally chosen by his colleagues with low scores, with his own will and took the road to Izmir, Dokuz Eylül University, the city where he would maintain his life.
Who could have known that in Izmir, where he came as an assistant, he would establish a fully equipped fourth clinic in addition to the three thoracic surgery clinics that existed at that time, and that he would be the Head of a Department that would change the destiny in this field in Izmir?
After a successful 5-year residency, he did his compulsory service in Tepecik Training and Research Hospital in Izmir due to the residency status of his wife, who was a physician like him. Those who know Izmir know that while there is Suat Seren Chest Diseases Hospital directly opposite Tepecik Hospital, no one applies to Tepecik Hospital for chest diseases. Hasan Hodja started to be approached only by patients who were too risky to be operated on and who had additional diseases at an advanced age, and when they were told that they could not be operated on at Suat Seren Hospital, they started to come to Hasan Hodja to ‘let's ask the other side’.
In such an environment, Hasan ERSÖZ, who had his first speciality experience, bravely undertook the risks and difficulties of these patients and operated on them without refusing any of them. His good results started to attract attention. He did not remain indifferent to the offer made to him by the Dean's Office of Kâtip Çelebi University of that period, ‘Would you like to do a much more comprehensive clinic establishment work at Atatürk Training and Research Hospital, which you have achieved in this hospital in one and a half years?’. Because this department had never been established in Atatürk Training and Research Hospital, the oldest hospital in Izmir, and it was a great deficiency for such an important hospital. It was not easy for them to find a teacher who would take on this burden and succeed in this work. Dr ERSÖZ, who was passionate about his job and loved excitement, accepted this difficult task without blinking an eye.
After a short-term Manisa State Hospital experience due to the completion of his wife's term in Izmir and the bureaucratic delay of his transfer to Kâtip Çelebi University, he returned to Izmir again, this time with the title of ‘Assistant Professor’ and the title of ‘Head of the Department of Thoracic Surgery - Founding Faculty Member’.
When he started his new job, he knew how difficult it would be. Because the clinic did not even have a pair of scissors. He did not even have a secretary to make the necessary correspondence for the establishment of the clinic. Everyone around him asked him, "Why did you go to this department? There is no previous surgery, no patient records, no database... How will you publish in this state? How will you become an associate professor?". However, he never took refuge behind excuses. He worked and endeavoured. He had to explain his projects and plans to each new administration in the university and hospital, which constantly changed chief physicians, deans and rectors with the wind of bureaucracy. Because each incoming administration approached him with scepticism and distrust due to the fact that he was the head of the department at a young age. However, he managed to gain the trust of each administration with his persistent diligence and the services he produced.
Firstly, he rolled up his sleeves by learning the EBYS system to do correspondence. On the one hand, he was begging the administrations to get all the deficiencies of the clinic, taking care of correspondence and bureaucratic affairs, on the one hand, he was performing surgeries by placing patients in beds in other wards in the clinic without a service, and on the other hand, he was trying to complete his publications by conducting animal experiments in the clinic without a database in order to become an associate professor. While doing all these, he was also teaching the Thoracic Surgery courses of Kâtip Çelebi University Faculty of Medicine students alone.
Moreover, he did not interrupt his own development in this intense environment. In January 2019, he went to Dr Diego Gonzales Rivas, the pioneer physician of closed lung surgery in Shanghai-China. Due to his close friendship with him, he learnt all the technical secrets from Diego.
When he returned, everyone told him that he should perform 50 surgeries with a mentor, but the fact that the teacher who would be his mentor went there with an offer from the USA did not discourage him. He continued on his way without a mentor and started to perform these surgeries successfully without complications. He had already reached the mentioned figure of 50 on his own in a very short time. Although he was offered to give a speech on ‘How did I succeed without a mentor?’ at a symposium, he did not accept the speech because he was afraid of the reaction of the community on this issue.
His publications on animal experiments were so successful that he received support from TÜBİTAK projects and was published in very high quality journals (in Japanese and other science-leading countries' journals), especially in international journals belonging to the Oxford University Library (which is a great prestige even to publish a publication in these journals), and received a high number of citations and letters of praise.
In 2020, he was only 35 years old when he was awarded the title of ‘Associate Professor’. But this feeling was not surprising for him. Because we are talking about a physician who became a ‘Doctor’ at the age of 23, a ‘specialist doctor’ at the age of 28, an ‘Assistant Professor’ at the age of 31, and a ‘Head of Department and Clinic Chief’ at the age of 31. In 2020, he organised an international symposium on pectus deformities (chest deformities), which is his special area of interest, and gathered a large number of internationally renowned doctors from every city in Turkey and from countries such as Italy, Iraq and Saudi Arabia to his clinic and performed live surgeries and trained these doctors.
At the end of the 6.5-year challenging process at Izmir Kâtip Çelebi University; the clinic, which previously did not even have scissors, has now become a fully equipped clinic with its own service and all its staff, accredited by the Board of Medical Specialties, which has started to provide thoracic surgery specialty training, that is, with assistants, 2 Associate Professors, 1 Dr. Faculty Member (formerly Assistant Professor), 2 Specialist Doctors, 2 Assistant Doctors. It is one of the two centres in the Aegean Region where Pectus Deformities are operated, the only place where non-surgical treatment is performed, the place where closed thoracic surgery (VATS) is performed, the 4th thoracic surgery clinic in Izmir. The thoracic surgery clinic had become a physician and a clinic with numerous international and national achievements such as one of the rare places where the complicated surgery called ‘carinal sleeve pneumonectomy’ was performed, the place where bronchial fistula repair was performed with the fifth ASD umbrella in the world, the place where pectus deformity surgery was performed with the fifth cross bar in the world, the place where pectus repair was performed with the second 4 bar in the world. Of course, all these surgeries had his signature...
Afterwards, he thought that the difficulties of practising medicine in state hospitals in recent years, the games of bureaucratic and academic life, and the things he struggled with outside his profession were wasting his energy. He decided to devote all his energy to his profession and his patients by opening his own private clinic. Who knows, maybe he wanted to seek a new excitement in a new medium with the satisfaction of being the head of the department in the third largest city of Turkey at the age of 31 and the successes he achieved in every field of academics. With his courageous temperament, he resigned from Izmir Kâtip Çelebi University Faculty of Medicine, Department of Thoracic Surgery, where he had worked for years and was the founder, where he had been the head of the department for 6.5 years, although he was only 37 years old, without even blinking an eye, and started to practice his profession in his own private clinic since October 2022.
He is married and has two children.