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Oregon Health & Science University has put trauma surgeon Martin Schreiber on administrative leave after a complaint about him from a resident, a person familiar with the matter said.
Schreiber is the director of OHSU’s Donald D. Trunkey Center for Civilian and Combat Casualty Care. OHSU credits the Trunkey Center for making OHSU one of the top five trauma research programs in the U.S.
It’s also a cash cow. Schreiber is one of three doctors who together “bring in more than $28 million in federal and industry funding,” according to OHSU’s website. It doesn’t say if the figure is annual.
OHSU spokeswoman Sara Hottman said she couldn’t say anything about Schreiber’s employment status. “In accordance with OHSU’s employee confidentiality practices, we cannot comment on whether an employee is on leave,” she said in an email.
Reached on his mobile phone, Schreiber said: “I can’t talk about it.”
A respected trauma surgeon, Schreiber sometimes made comments that offended staff, said the person familiar with his exit.
Schreiber has been at OHSU since 2002. He is a professor of trauma surgery in the medical school. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and an M.D. from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he grew up, according to an article about him on the OHSU Foundation website.
Schreiber joined the U.S. Army Reserve during medical school and, as of June 2020, was an active colonel. He comes from humble beginnings. His mother escaped Poland during World War II and spent her childhood in Siberia “cutting down trees for bread and water with her parents and two brothers,” the foundation article says.
Schreiber’s mother came to the U.S. to pursue a career in medicine and died of breast cancer at 42, when Schreiber was 8. Growing up, Schreiber “saved money by collecting cans on the beach and living on a bare-bones diet of chicken hearts and livers,” according to the article.
Schreiber volunteered for active duty in both Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. He was deployed three times, serving in Iraq in 2005 and Afghanistan in 2010 and 2014, the article says. He was chief of surgery at the military hospital in Tikrit, Iraq, and director of the joint theater trauma system in Bagram, Afghanistan.
The Trunkey Center is named for the late Dr. Donald Trunkey, a colonel in the Army Reserve during the 1991 invasion of Iraq. He went on to become emeritus chair of surgery at OHSU.