One of the country’s most recognized trauma surgeons has joined the staff at Madigan Army Medical Center on a full-time basis, bringing decades of combat experience, clinical research, and surgical education to the military medical community at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
Dr. Martin A. Schreiber, MD, FACS, FCCM, FRCST (Hon), has accepted a full-time general-schedule federal position as a general surgeon at Madigan, where he will also serve as Director of Surgical Research in the Department of Surgery. He continues to hold the rank of Colonel in the United States Army Reserve Medical Corps and maintains an appointment as Adjunct Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
In the new role, Dr. Schreiber will care for surgical patients across the clinic, operating room, hospital wards, and intensive care unit. He will also teach medical students, residents, and fellows, and continue his research program focused on improving outcomes after traumatic brain injury and hemorrhagic shock, the two leading causes of preventable death in both combat and civilian trauma.
The transition marks a new chapter for a physician whose career has been defined by movement between the most demanding environments medicine offers, from combat hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan to academic research centers, national training programs, and international conference stages.
A Career Built on Two Tracks
Dr. Schreiber studied chemistry at the University of Chicago before earning his medical degree at Case Western Reserve University. His surgical training brought him to Madigan Army Medical Center as an intern and then the University of Washington, where he served as Chief Resident and completed a fellowship in surgical critical care. He went on to teach at William Beaumont Army Medical Center, Texas Tech University, Baylor College of Medicine, and the Uniformed Services University before joining Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, where he became Professor of Surgery with additional appointments in physiology, pharmacology, and regenerative medicine.
At OHSU he led the Donald D. Trunkey Center for Civilian and Combat Casualty Care, building a research program supported by the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, and private industry. His published work now exceeds 600 scientific papers covering resuscitation strategy, blood product development, traumatic brain injury, and hemorrhage control.
His military career has run alongside that academic track throughout. He deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, serving as Chief of Surgery of the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Tikrit and as Chief of Trauma at the 228th Combat Support Hospital at Shank. He also directed the Joint Theater Trauma System, overseeing efforts to improve and standardize trauma care across the armed forces. Those assignments produced clinical lessons that he has spent the years since translating into training programs and research protocols used by both military and civilian trauma teams.
Recent Speaking Events
Dr. Schreiber’s transition to Madigan follows a period of significant national and international visibility on the conference circuit.
In November 2025, he delivered the keynote address at the North Pacific Surgical Association annual meeting in Banff, Canada. The meeting, focused on military and civilian collaborations in surgery, drew surgeons from across the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada. His keynote was titled “Large Scale Combat Operations: Are We Ready?” and examined military and civilian health system preparedness for mass casualty events, reviewing advances from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including improvements in tourniquet use, whole blood transfusion, and earlier treatment for traumatic brain injury, while pressing attendees on whether those advances had been sufficiently absorbed into current training and readiness plans.
He closed the address with a direct charge to the audience: “Turn talk into drills, drills into habits, and habits into lives saved.”
Earlier in 2026, Dr. Schreiber presented at the Surgical, Trauma, and Acute Care Surgery conference on why trauma systems fail first in large-scale war, drawing on lessons from the Pacific campaign and his most recent clinical experience to challenge modern health systems on their current level of preparation.
Most recently, he served on the Program Committee and as part of the core faculty and leadership team at the 59th annual Trauma, Critical Care and Acute Care Surgery conference in Las Vegas, the longest-running trauma education meeting in the country, founded in 1967 under Dr. John Batdorf. His focus at that conference centered on practical resuscitation questions: how to get blood and critical supplies to injured patients fast enough, and what the current evidence says about best practice when conditions are not ideal.
National Leadership Roles
Beyond his clinical and research work, Dr. Schreiber serves as National Director of the Definitive Surgical Trauma Care Course, helping set surgical training standards used around the world. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, where he has served as Region X Chief of the Committee on Trauma and as Chair of the Advocacy Committee of the Board of Governors. He has also chaired the Trauma Center Association of America.
He was recently named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Thailand, a recognition of the international reach of his research and teaching. His prior awards include the John P. Pryor Distinguished Service Award in Military Casualty Care from the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma and the Henry Harkins Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Washington.
More information about Dr. Schreiber’s research, publications, and professional background is available at martinschreiber.co.
