Department of Surgery Vice Chair Kenji Inaba, MD, professor of surgery (clinical scholar) at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, has been named chief of the division of trauma, emergency surgery and surgical critical care at Keck Medicine of USC, administrators announced recently.

“Dr. Inaba is a remarkable trauma surgeon and beloved educator who has long served as the director for the general surgery residency program and the critical care fellowship,” said Vaughn Starnes, MD, chair and Distinguished Professor of Surgery at the Keck School. “He has also built close ties to the Los Angeles community, in no small part due to his role as a highly trained Los Angeles reserve police officer.”

Inaba serves as a director on the American Board of Surgery, the national certifying organization for surgeons, and has won 26 different teaching awards at the Keck School. He also has contributed to more than 525 scholarly articles, with research interests including advanced local hemostatics for intracorporeal hemorrhage control, acute resuscitation of the critically ill patient, and quality improvement and medical errors in trauma patient management, among many others.

Inaba is taking over for Demetrios Demetriades, MD, PhD, professor of surgery at the Keck School, who is stepping aside from the division chief role to focus his considerable expertise on the trauma and acute care surgery program at Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center (LAC+USC), Starnes wrote in the memo. Demetriades has been instrumental in building LAC+USC’s Level I Trauma Center into an internationally lauded institution, and along the way has become one of the world’s leading trauma experts and one of its most-published trauma surgeons.

— Lex Davis