Prof. Ronald Merrell
Dr. Merrell is Emeritus Professor of Surgery at Virginia Commonwealth University where he was Stuart McGuire Professor and Chairman of VCU’s Department of Surgery from 1999 to 2003. Dr. Merrell was also the Clinical Director of VCU Health Systems Telemedicine Program. Previously he was the Lampman Professor and Chairman of Surgery at Yale University School of Medicine. He was Vice Dean at the University of Texas Health Science Center Houston and Professor of Surgery at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. He obtained B.S. and M.D. degrees from the University of Alabama, which is his home state and trained in surgery and biological chemistry at Washington University in St Louis.
Dr. Merrell has had a long relationship with NASA as advisor in aerospace medicine and researcher in telemedicine. He was awarded the Public Serve medal by NASA on three occasions. He is also a frequent advisor to the Department of Defense regarding telemedicine. Dr Merrell has established successful programs in industry and government in the field of informatics research. His innovative work in telemedicine includes early use of Internet telemedicine, sensor applications, transmission solutions and program design. His efforts in international telemedicine have led to significant programs in ten countries and extensive work in remote and hostile environments including Mt Everest, the Amazon and Africa. He has long been associated with telemedicine and surgical education programs. He is a member of the College of Fellows of the American Telemedicine Association.
As a surgical educator he has been recognized by the universities he has served and their students with many awards including the Kaiser Award at Stanford, the John McGovern award at the University of Texas Houston, and the Edward Storer Award at Yale. At Yale he also founded the Yale Surgical Society. He has over 380 publications and serves on the editorial boards of several major surgical journals. Dr Merrell was named to the Best Doctors in America list for the last decade of his practice. He is an editor-in-chief of Telemedicine and E-Health, an official journal of the American Telemedicine Association and the International Society for Telemedicine and e-Health.
