USA Health welcomes new trauma surgeon

By Lindsay Mott
lmott@health.southalabama.edu

While completing a fellowship in acute care surgery in Baltimore, Larry Lee, M.D., made a decision on the next step in his medical career. Lee, who trained at USA Health - both as a medical student and a resident physician - decided to return to the organization where he started.

“The culture at USA Health has allowed it to find and hold onto people that work well together and love what they do - be it patient care, education, or research,” said Lee, who is now an assistant professor in the department of surgery and works in the division of trauma and acute care surgery.

Lee was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and grew up in Auburn, Alabama. He studied biomedical engineering and biotechnology at Johns Hopkins University before completing his medical degree at the University of South Alabama College of Medicine. He also completed a residency in general surgery and a surgical research fellowship at USA Health. Most recently, he completed a critical care fellowship at Johns Hopkins University.

Heading into medical school, Lee was planning to pursue immunology when a trauma surgery case in his third year at USA took him in a new direction. He described the case where he was part of a team that completed open cardiac massage and internal defibrillation. As an early third-year medical student, this was the “benchmark” that he measured the rest of his year against and nothing else compared. Now, he returns to USA Health University Hospital to pursue an academic career in surgery with a team he knows well.

“The job is exactly what I was looking for - ample research time balanced with clinical duties, senior colleagues invested in my professional success, and a mission of being academically successful,” he said.