Obituary: Mitchell P. Fink

Fig. 1 Mitchell P. Fink Mitchell P. Fink, MD (Fig. 1), one of the most inspiring and influential leaders in the field of intensive care medicine, died at 66 years of age on 17 November 2015 after being diagnosed this summer with an aggressive sarcoma. This devastating news has left many of us with a huge sense of loss and sadness. Mitch graduated from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO, in 1976 and completed general surgery training at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, MD, in 1981. Thereafter, he held faculty positions at the Bethesda Naval Center and the University of Massachusetts, where he worked as surgeon and intensivist. In 1992 he moved to the Harvard Medical School, eventually becoming the Johnson and Johnson Professor in Surgery and surgeon-in-chief at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He moved to the University of Pittsburgh in 1999, where he subsequently became the inaugural chair of the Department of Critical Care Medicine. He founded several companies based on discoveries from his laboratory and, in 2007, left the university to oversee the formation of one of these ventures. In 2009 Mitch returned to academia, joining the faculty at University of California Los Angeles where he held the title of Professor of Surgery and Vice Chair for Critical Care. During his career, Mitch cared for thousands of patients with skill and compassion, amassed a great body of experimental and clinical research, trained and mentored hundreds of physicians and scientists, demonstrated wonderful entrepreneurship, and carved a vision of modern multidisciplinary critical care with lasting benefits for our entire field. For decades, academic medicine has praised the rare individual who excels as the socalled triple threat: teacher, clinician, and scientist. Mitch was all three and more, adding to these triple roles the rare gift of visionary leader in both academia and industry. I have never known anyone quite like Mitch. His extraordinary career began early with a first author paper in Nature while still in medical school. While