Chris Dente recognized with Emory at Grady Innovation Award
JANUARY 2021
Christopher D. Dente, MD, professor of surgery and chief of the general surgery service of Emory at Grady, is the recipient of the Emory at Grady Innovation Award for 2020, which honors faculty who have used creativity and innovation to improve patient care or trainee education by implementing new technologies/procedures, making significant scientific discoveries, creating new operational processes, or pioneering new educational programs. The Emory at Grady Professional Development Committee established the award.
Dr. Dente has been a clinically active general and trauma surgeon and surgical intensivist at Grady Memorial Hospital since joining Emory Surgery in 2004, and rotates regularly on Grady's trauma service and SICU. He is highly dedicated to quality and safety, and currently serves as the medical director for trauma PI of the Georgia Trauma and Surgical Quality Collaborative, and chairs Grady's Trauma Quality Improvement Program Committee.
His research focuses on the creation and use of biomarker and clinical data warehouse-based decision support tools. He is the PI of the Emory site of a Department of Defense-funded pilot wound closure study, and the lead site investigator at Grady's trauma center for the multi-center Surgical Critical Care Initiative (SC2i), also sponsored by the DoD. SC2i is translating DoD-developed decision-making tools for the battlefield to civilian critical care.
From 2004-2018, Dr. Dente held various leadership positions in the two year trauma surgery residency/surgical critical care fellowship. One of his primary achievements was leading the restructuring of the trauma surgery year into an acute care surgery fellowship, which was accredited by the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma in 2017, becoming one of only 20 AAST approved programs in the country at that time and the only one in Georgia.