Thomas F. O’Donnell, Jr., MD, FACS

Benjamin Andrews Emeritus Professor of Surgery
Tufts University School of Medicine
Boston, MA

Thomas F. O’Donnell, Jr., MD is the Senior Vascular Surgeon at Tufts Medical Center and the Benjamin Andrews Emeritus Professor and Chair of Surgery at Tufts University School of Medicine (TUSM). A graduate of Harvard College, where he concentrated in the Classics, he is a 1967 Cum Laude graduate of TUSM. At TUSM he was elected to AOA and served as class president and president of the student council. While serving as Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Tufts Medical Center and TUSM, he was asked by the trustees of Tufts Medical Center to serve as the CEO and President of that institution, a position he held for nearly a decade through 2004. He then returned to the full-time practice of vascular surgery and clinical research. Dr. O’Donnell completed his residency on the Harvard 5th Surgical Service at Boston City Hospital, which was interrupted by two years of service with the US Navy (1969-1971) and assigned to the US Marine Corps. His self-initiated research on heat-stress injuries among young Marines recruits at Parris Island during training exercises was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA and led to changes in the way Marine recruits were trained. For this work he received the U.S. Navy Surgeon General’s Certificate of Merit.

His current particular areas of research have been chronic venous insufficiency and lymphedema, which were stimulated by his year of postgraduate work at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London during 1974-1975 with Professors John Kinmonth and Sir Norman Browse. As Chief of the Division of Vascular Surgery and Director of the Vascular Fellowship from 1983-1993 at Tufts Medical Center, he has trained a long list of vascular fellows, many of whom hold leadership positions in academic surgery. This June he will complete his 41st year on the faculty of TUSM, where he has taught generations of medical students and has served on various medical school committees as well as the Board of Overseers of TUSM and the Sackler School from 2003-2007.

Over the last decade he has authored a number of systematic reviews and meta-analyses with his colleagues at Tufts Center for Evidence-Based Research, Joseph Lau and Ethan Balk, which also included three AHRQ Technology Assessments for CMS. He presented one of these systematic reviews, “Usual care in the management of chronic wounds: A review of the recent literature,” at the April 2005 Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee (MEDCAC) meeting on wound care. He recently co-edited The Clinical practice guidelines of the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) and the American Venous Forum (AVF): Management of venous leg ulcers. The majority of his 182 articles in peer-reviewed journals, 67 Book chapters, and 15 videos/ films on techniques deal with vascular disease. He is a regular lecturer for the educational programs at national and regional vascular society meetings and named lectureships. He served as a clinical coordinator for a series of stem cell trials for patients with non-reconstructible vascular disease and advanced ischemia. Last July he was one of the presenters at the MEDCAC panel on lower extremity chronic venous disease. With a 40+ year interest in wounds, particularly venous ulcers, he has been a staff member of the Tufts Center for Wound Healing for over a decade. O’Donnell has served as the President of the Society for Vascular Surgery, the American Venous Forum, the New England Society for Vascular Surgery, the Eastern Vascular Society, and the Boston Surgical Society. He currently is on the editorial boards of: The Journal of Vascular Surgery, Phlebology and WOUNDS.