Name Ronald Tompkins | Role Professor | |
Ronald Gary Tompkins, MD, ScD He is the Sumner M. Redstone Professor of Surgery at the Harvard Medical School and Founding Director of the Center for Surgery, Innovation & Bioengineering at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). He was formerly the Chief of the Burns and Trauma Services at the MGH from 1990 - 2000 and Chief of the Burn Service from 2000 - 2014. He held the position of Chief of Staff at the Shriners Hospitals for Children - Boston from 1990 - 2012. In addition to Tompkins' surgical activities, he has been very active in clinically-driven research primarily involving inflammation and the changing metabolism in humans after injury. He is probably best known as the principal investigator in the NIGMS large scale collaborative program entitled "Inflammation and the Host Response to Injury", which was active from 2001 - 2012. This program involved the study of the genomics and proteomics in humans after serious blunt trauma and burn injury.
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Biography
Tompkins was born in Many, Louisiana. He received an undergraduate degree in chemistry at Tulane University graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1972. He graduated from Tulane University Medical School in 1976, followed by a surgical residency at the MGH. He interrupted his surgical training after three years to attain a ScD degree in chemical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1983, working under Clark Colton, whose interests include biomedical engineering, biochemical engineering, and mass transfer and Ken Smith. His research involved the mass transport of low-density lipoproteins in the vascular tissues of primates as an insight into the science of atherogenesis. He then returned to the MGH and completed his surgical training in 1986. He joined the MGH and Harvard Medical School faculties in 1987. He was appointed as the John F. Burke Professor of Surgery at HMS in 1994 and the Sumner M. Redstone Professor of Surgery in 2004. He has since held many positions of leadership in national organizations and is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.
Research
His earlier research was heavily involved in tissue engineering and artificial organ development. His research evolved into the biochemistry, genomics, and proteomics of inflammation and its effects upon metabolism. This has been supported by a P50 "Burn Trauma Center" and T32 Burn Trauma Training Program both of which began in 1976 and 1975 respectively. Currently, Tompkins continues his collaborative research programs together with the research programs of Mehmet Toner PhD, who is the Founding Director of the BioMEMS Resource Center and Martin L. Yarmush, MD, PhD, who is the Founding Director of the Center for Engineering in Medicine. These three longstanding research programs are combined efforts within the new Center for Surgery, Innovation and Bioengineering.