Townsend elected ACS President-Elect

Courtney M. Townsend, Jr., MD, FACS, the Robertson-Poth Distinguished Chair in General Surgery, department of surgery, University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), Galveston, was elected President-Elect of the American College of Surgeons (ACS).

Townsend's professional roles include professor of surgery, department of surgery; professor of physician’s assistant studies, school of allied health sciences; and graduate faculty in the cell biology program at the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, UTMB.  

Other leadership roles include past director and chairman of the American Board of Surgery, American Pancreatic Association president, American Surgical Association president and Southern Surgical Association president. He also is an honorary member of He is an honorary member of the Society of Black Academic Surgeons and the Association of Women Surgeons (AWS) and is a recipient of the John P. McGovern Lifetime Achievement Award in Oslerian Medicine. 

Townsend earned his medical degree and completed his internship and general surgery training at UTMB.  He completed a surgical oncology fellowship at the University of California-Los Angeles and was a McLaughlin Fellow twice, a Jeanne B. Kempner Fellow, an American Cancer Society Clinical fellow and a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow.