Tjasa Hranjec, MD

After finishing her undergraduate (University of Rochester) and post-graduate education (SUNY Stony Brook Medical School), Tjasa Hranjec, MD/MS-CR, pursued her General Surgery training at the University of Virginia. In 2014, she completed the fellowship in Trauma/Critical Care Surgery from the University of Texas at Southwestern (UTSW)/Parkland. To better serve the injured patients, Dr. Hranjec pursued additional training in Abdominal Transplantation (UTSW). Over the past decade, she has specialized in caring for the patients with the most challenging acute and chronic conditions: cirrhosis and acute liver failure, large abdominal wall defects, bowel fistulas, injuries to retroperitoneum, hilum, ureter or pelvis, severe coagulopathy following injury, and many others. After becoming the Vice-Chief, then Chief of Surgery at Memorial Regional Hospital in May 2019, she initiated a multitude of projects to better patient outcomes. She created the “TEG (thromboelastography) task force” in an attempt to study and eliminate coagulopathy (bleeding and clotting in trauma, transplant and critically ill patients), her main research interest. Dr. Hranjec has also studied surgical infections, immunosuppression, malnutrition, use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) to improve and increase organ donation, and decellularization and recellularization of organs. She has worked with numerous medical students, residents and staff as an educator, colleague and research mentor and looks to inspire the next generation of surgeons and scientists.