Todd E. Rasmussen, MD, FACS
Colonel USAF MC
Professor of Surgery – F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at Uniformed Services University
Attending Vascular Surgeon – Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Bethesda, Maryland 20814-4712
Colonel Todd Rasmussen completed his medical degree at Mayo Medical School in 1993 and surgical training at Wilford Hall Medical Center on Lackland Air Force Base in 1999. He returned to Mayo for vascular surgery training after which he was assigned to the National Capital Area just before 9.11.2001. Soon after, he began caring for injured returning from Afghanistan at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC.
In 2004 Colonel Rasmussen returned to San Antonio and deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom at the Air Force Theater Hospital on Balad Air Base. Following this he initiated a vascular injury and hemorrhage control research program. He’s completed tours in Iraq (2004, 2008) and Afghanistan (2006, 2010 and 2012) and led training missions in Morocco, Pakistan and Russia. His research has resulted in 300 publications, an h-index of 41 and more than 6,500 citations. In 2012 he gave a TED talk on the impact of military trauma care on civilian medicine, and in 2017 a life-saving device that he co-invented, the REBOA catheter, was featured in the New York Times science & technology section.
Colonel Rasmussen served as Deputy Commander of the Institute of Surgical Research and then directed the DoD Combat Casualty Care Research Program at Fort Detrick, Maryland. In 2017 he became Associate Dean for Clinical Research at the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Service University where he is Professor of Surgery. Colonel Rasmussen is a vascular surgeon at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and a consultant surgeon at the National Institutes of Health. His awards include the Gold Headed Cane for distinction in clinical practice and the Dominique Jean Larrey for Excellence in Military Surgery. In 2014 he received the Special Operations Medical Association Tom Deal Award and 2015 he was recognized as a Hero in Military Medicine. Colonel Rasmussen is a 2019-2020 AAMC Council of Deans Fellow and in February he delivered the Peter Safar lecture at the Society of Critical Care Medicine. Colonel Rasmussen will retire from the Air Force after 28 years of service and join the surgical staff of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota in the spring of 2021.