His research was abundantly supported over several decades by the NIH, The Department of Defense and other federal agencies, as well as by industry. As an internationally distinguished scholar, he served on numerous scientific review committees and expert panels, including ad hoc and membership roles on multiple NIH study sections. He was an editor of multiple editions of the seminal Textbook of Critical Care Medicine and served on the editorial boards of over a dozen journals. In 2009, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles.Ī prolific author, Mitch contributed over 350 original articles to the surgical and scientific literature, in addition to numerous chapters, monographs and other works. In 2007, Mitch briefly left academia to pursue ventures in the private sector where he founded several companies based on discoveries in his and his collaborators’ laboratories that led to 16 patents. In 1999, he became the inaugural chair of the first Department of Critical Care Medicine in the nation at the University of Pittsburgh. He was recruited to Harvard Medical School as director of trauma and surgical critical care at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, where he was appointed the Johnson & Johnson Professor of Surgery and Surgeon-in-Chief at the newly merged Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Starting in 1984, he joined the University of Massachusetts where he rapidly rose to the academic rank of Professor, balancing clinical activities as a surgical intensivist while making important research advances in the area of gut-derived sepsis during shock using both experimental animals and reductionist models of GI mucosal and cellular injury. Following general surgery residency training at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda MD, he was appointed to the faculty at the Naval Medical Center where he directed the surgical research branch of the Combat Casualty Care Program Center and turned the focus of his scientific investigations to understanding sepsis, shock, and trauma. He graduated from the University of California Davis in 1970 and subsequently received a Master’s in Chemistry from UC Irvine followed by an M.D. Mitch was a native of San Francisco, the son and only child of Walt and Betty Fink. He was a member of the American Surgical Association for 20 years. At the time of his passing, Mitch was Professor of Surgery and Anesthesiology and Vice Chair of Critical Care in the Department of Surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles. Fink MD, one of the most creative and influential surgeon-scientists in the field of critical care, died Novemat the age of 66, after a short battle with an aggressive sarcoma.
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