Marcus Dortch, PharmD, has been tapped to serve as president of the UTHSC College of Pharmacy Alumni Board.
A native Memphian, Dr. Dortch spent time in both Memphis and Oxford, Mississippi, on his family’s farm while growing up. After graduating from East High School in Memphis, he enrolled at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he completed his pharmacy prerequisites. He later moved on to the UTHSC College of Pharmacy, earning his Doctor of Pharmacy degree in 2001. After pharmacy school, he went on to complete residency training at the Detroit Medical Center.
Post-residency, he headed to Chicago and worked as a clinical pharmacist at Rush North Shore and Saint Joseph’s hospitals. Lasting three Chicago winters, he decided to move south to Nashville to work at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. At Vanderbilt, he served as clinical pharmacy specialist in trauma/surgical critical care. He precepted pharmacy students from the UTHSC College of Pharmacy, as well as Vanderbilt PGY-1 and PGY-2 residents. As an adjunct faculty member, he also served as a course coordinator and instructor for the Critical Care Therapeutics elective course offered to P-2 students.
He authored several peer-reviewed manuscripts related to his involvement in research on hyperglycemia of critical illness, antimicrobial stewardship, and prevention of health care-associated infections. Dr. Dortch has served as a member of the American Society of Health-Systems Pharmacists, the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, and the Surgical Infection Society. He is also active at the national level with the Society of Critical Care Medicine, where he was appointed a fellow with the American College of Critical Care Medicine in 2013.
Since his time at Vanderbilt, he has also served as the senior director of Clinical Pharmacy Services at HealthTrust, where he led clinical pharmacy operations for the group purchasing organization’s membership, inclusive of 1,600 acute care hospital members with an aggregate of $7 billion in pharmacy spend. His passion for critical care eventually placed him in the biotech industry, where he has served as a medical science liaison for pharma companies focused on the development of antimicrobials and sepsis diagnostic instruments.
