Welcome New Chairman, Don C. Rockey, M.D.

Don C. Rockey, M.D. joined MUSC as Professor and Chairman of our Department of Medicine effective September 1, 2012. 

A native of Florida, Dr. Rockey’s medical career has taken him from coast to coast. In 1980 he received his bachelor's degree in biology (summa cum laude) from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and he earned his M.D. from the Medical College of Virginia, winning numerous awards for academic excellence during his four years in Richmond.

Dr. Rockey completed his internship, residency and fellowships in gastroenterology at the University of California San Francisco, and he served his first academic appointments on the UCSF faculty. In 1997 Dr. Rockey returned to the Southeast, joining the faculty at Duke University Medical Center as Chief of Hepatology and Director of the DUMC Liver Center in Durham, North Carolina. In 2005 he moved to Dallas, Texas to head the Division of Digestive and Liver Diseases at the University of Texas Southwestern, and he was named to the Dr. Carey G. King Jr. and Dr. Henry M. Winans Sr. Chair in Internal Medicine.

Dr. Rockey’s research efforts have been supported by the National Institutes of Health since 1989 and his current NIH funding includes grants totaling more than $3 million. He has also been very successful in securing research funding from other sources including foundations, associations and major medical corporations. The general focus of his basic science teams has been the study of wound healing using the liver as a model system. His clinical research interests revolve around establishing management strategies for patients with common gastrointestinal problems, especially GI bleeding, and the overall direction of these studies has been to help establish national patient management guidelines. He has authored more than 200scientific papers dealing with GI-related topics and has presented many invited lectures at gastroenterology and hepatology symposia around the United States and throughout the world. 

Dr. Rockey has served in a wide variety of positions with the major professional associations in his field. A member of the American Association of Physicians, the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease, the American Gastroenterological Association, and the American College of Physicians, he currently serves as president of the Association of Specialty Professors. He has served as a member of many NIH study sections including the Hepatobiliary Pathophysiology Study Section, and he has worked as Associate Editor for the liver-focused journals, Hepatology and Liver International. He provides editorial and reviewer services to 25 major medical publications including Nature, Science, JCI and the New England Journal of Medicine.