Brittany K. Bankhead, MD

Brittany Bankhead, M.D., recently joined the Department of Surgery as an associate professor. Dr. Bankhead is a double-board certified trauma and general surgeon and a surgical intensivist. Before joining MUSC, she was an assistant professor of surgery at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC). This fall, she was awarded the President’s Innovation Award at TTUHSC and the prestigious “40 under 40” award by the Association of Women Surgeons.

During her time as the Stop the Bleed State Champion of Texas for the Committee on Trauma, she saw a need for improved hemorrhage control training. She built a multidisciplinary regional team that was accepted into the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (NSF I-Corps), an immersive, entrepreneurial training program. During this prestigious program, Dr. Bankhead’s team shifted their focus for commercialization from solely local injury prevention to also include improved military biofeedback hemorrhage control training. Dr. …Bankhead’s team received regional and national funding, including a $50,000 grant for the NSF iCorps award.

She most recently was selected, among a large national cohort, to present her medical technology in Washington, DC, at a multidisciplinary innovation conference with large military and federal influence. This has given her the ability to continue to work towards her future goals of large-scale NIH federal innovation funding and commercialization with a military focus. Dr. Bankhead is looking forward to multidisciplinary collaboration and helping grow the network of research and commercialization opportunities at MUSC.

During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Bankhead was part of the inaugural international group “CovidSurg” through the National Institute for Health Research Unit on Global Surgery in the United Kingdom. Her experiences and insights from the frontline were shared in multiple national outlets, including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and the New Yorker.

Dr. Bankhead is passionate about ensuring healthcare workers feel an open door to discussing hardships & trials concomitantly with their pursuit of excellent patient care. She served as a panelist at the inaugural “Surgeons as Second Victims” lecture at the American College of Surgeons annual meeting and helped create the roundtable “Finding Comfort in Discomfort… Reflecting on Stories Told” at the 2022 American Association for Academic Surgery presidential session. She is equally passionate about ensuring females feel an open door to starting and maintaining a productive career in surgery.

Dr. Bankhead's leadership extends beyond her clinical practice. She currently is currently the vice chair of the Associate Membership Committee of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma; she assumes the role of chair in September. She also serves on the Editorial Board for Trauma and Acute Care Surgery Open and Impact Surgery.