HIC 2009 Keynote Speakers

Ronald TompkinsRonald Tompkins, Chief, Burns Service, Massachusetts General Hospital Sumner M. Redstone Professor of Surgery Harvard Medical School, Chief of Staff, Shriners Hospitals for Children - Boston

Ronald G. Tompkins, M.D., Sc.D. is the Sumner M. Redstone Professor of Surgery at the Harvard Medical School, the Chief of the Burns Service of the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Chief of Staff of the Shriners Hospitals for Children - Boston. He received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from Tulane University (summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa), an M.D. degree from Tulane Medical School (Alpha Omega Alpha), an S.M. degree in chemical enginneering and a Sc.D. degree in medical and chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Tompkins has served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) since 1986. He was the Chief of the Trauma Services at MGH beginning in 1990 until 2000 when he has chosen to focus on exclusively on burn injuries from a clinical perspective.

Dr. Tompkins has served on dozens of national and international committees and received multiple honors including a fellowship from the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and an honorary M.A. from Harvard University, and he is a senior director of the American Board of Surgery. Dr. Tompkins has served as an officer including the Presidency and Boards of more than a dozen national and international academic societies. Dr. Tompkins is a Past-President of the American Burn Association and is the current President of the International Society for Burn Injuries.

Dr. Tompkins is recognized as an international leader in burns and trauma, and serves as the principal investigator of several National Institutes of Health grants, including U54, P50, and T32 programs. Dr. Tompkins participated in two programs - Burn Trauma Center and Training Programs in Burns and Trauma that were initiated by Dr. John Burke in the 1970s. He became the principal investigator and has continued these programs to strengthen and evolve these research programs for the last 17 years. Dr. Tompkins also is the principal investigator of one of the glue grants within NIGMS entitled Host Response to Inflammation that has recently entered its Year 7.

He has published more than 400 contributions to the medical literature. His research interests include the metabolic and inflammatory responses to injury, tissue engineering, and in innovations in medicine. Multiple of his research efforts in burns have found applications in other very important areas of medicine including fetal medicine and cancer.