Santos Named Department of Surgery Chair for TTUHSC School of Medicine in Lubbock

• By Mark Hendricks
• April 29, 2025
• Education

 

As the new Department of Surgery chair for the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) School of Medicine in Lubbock, Ariel Santos, M.D., M.P.H., seeks to elevate TTUHSC’s role as the Hub of Surgery for West Texas.

Santos presently serves as director of telemedicine and a principal investigator for the TexLa Telehealth Resource Center, an initiative funded by HRSA that seeks to improve health care access, quality and outcomes by expanding the capacity and usage of telehealth in Texas and Louisiana. He said serving as surgery chair and remaining in his role at TexLa will be a challenge, considering the demands of the jobs.

“However, my new role also gives me the opportunity to highlight the utility of telemedicine in surgery, and also to leverage my role as the head of our department to convince other department chairs to utilize telemedicine in their respective practice,” Santos explained. “If surgeons can use telemedicine in their specialty, the other chairs should also be able to utilize it too in their respective departments.”

After receiving his medical degree from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, Philippines, Santos earned his master’s degree in public health from the University of Louisville in Kentucky. His post-doctoral education, completed at the University of Louisville Hospital, included a general surgery residency and a surgical critical care fellowship.

Following graduation, Santos practiced surgery as a clinical fellow at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and as a solo practitioner for Canada’s Labrador-Grenfell Health System in Newfoundland and Labrador. He also became a certified specialist and fellow of Canada’s Royal College of Surgeons. Upon his return to the U.S., Santos joined the Trauma division at Penn State University Medical Center, starting as an assistant professor and ultimately becoming associate program director of Emergency General Surgery. He arrived at TTUHSC in 2015.

On his way to becoming TTUHSC’s Lubbock surgery chair, Santos said he has been fortunate to have had excellent leaders and predecessors who paved the way for the department.

“I know that I will never achieve anything substantial without the support and hard work of every member of the department, from our staff and advanced practitioners to our students, residents and faculty members who show excellent work day in day out,” Santos said. “Through this synergistic effort, we will achieve our goal to deliver excellence in our missions with the aim of enhancing our reputation regionally, nationally and internationally.”

Santos believes in and highly values research as one of the pillars of academic surgery. His primary focus is on surgical, clinical and outcomes-based research, and he has collaborated with various multicenter trials and with surgical societies such as the American College of Surgeons, the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma, the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma and the Society of Critical Care Medicine.

In his new role as chair, Santos intends to continue his current research activities, but he also will dedicate attention and continue to support the Department of Surgery’s research output as a whole.

“We already have a vigorous clinical, basic science and outcome research with the Department of Surgery that is centered on the Burn Center for Research Excellence under Dr. (Kendra) Rumbaugh, and also the TTUHSC Clinical Research Institute, which started with the Department of Surgery,” Santos said.

Santos said the department currently has two grants from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, but there is room for significant growth, especially in research. As chair, he will seek to strengthen the Department of Surgery’s current infrastructure by getting more grants and encouraging students, residents and faculty to cultivate an increased interest in more research work on their own and through partnership with other TTUHSC departments and schools, research societies, the medical industry and other research institutions.

“My primary goal as chair is to expand and elevate TTUHSC’s role as hub of surgery in West Texas and beyond,” Santos said. “We can accomplish this by fostering innovative yet compassionate surgical care, teaching and training a new batch of world-class surgeons and promoting research and innovation in the surgery department.”