Christopher J. Dente,
MD

Doctor's Bio

Having completed a surgical residency at Wayne State University in 2002 and Surgical Critical Care training at Emory in 2004 and achieving board certification in both specialties, Dr. Christopher Dente has been on Emory’s faculty at Grady Memorial Hospital since 2004. He helped build Emory University’s AAST verified Acute Care Surgery fellowship, which is partially-based at Grady and the Chief of General Surgery for Emory at Grady Memorial Hospital.

In collaboration with the Department of Transfusion Medicine, Dr. Dente led the four-year process of developing and implementing the massive transfusion protocol now in place at Grady. He is also the lead site investigator at Grady’s trauma center for the multi-center Surgical Critical Care Initiative (SC2i), also sponsored by the Department of Defense (DoD). SC2i is translating decision-making tools developed by the DoD for the battlefield to civilian critical care. In the process, the participating civilian centers are sharing any revisions back to the DoD so that it may further refine its battlefield procedures.

Since joining the Emory Surgery faculty at Grady, Dr. Dente held leadership positions in the two-year trauma surgery residency/surgical critical care fellowship. Over time, he led 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. He became one of only 20 AAST approved programs in the country at that time and the only one in Georgia.

While he maintains a very active clinical practice in trauma and general surgery at Georgia’s largest level I trauma center, he has also published multiple manuscripts on a variety of topics in acute care surgery, including his longtime experience with the development and implementation of Grady’s Massive Transfusion Protocol. He has had a recent focus on the creation of biomarker-based clinical decision support tools to aid clinicians in decision making in critically ill and injured patients. He is the current Chair of the Georgia Committee on Trauma and a member of multiple academic societies in his field.