Dr. Deepak K. Ozhathil is a burn, trauma and critical care surgeon who is passionate about caring for adults and children whose lives have been turned upside down by traumatic events. While his name may be difficult to pronounce, his philosophy on patient care is very simple. He believes in providing the highest caliber of evidence-based medicine in a compassionate and patient-centric manor. Immediately after a trauma, Dr. Ozhathil's top priority is preservation of life-and-limb; however, he understands that the work required does not end there. In the aftermath of a severe trauma and especially with a burn, both physical and emotional scars can have a devastating effect on a patient's identity and ability to return to the life they knew. Therefore, Dr. Ozhathil works with a dedicated interdisciplinary team of caregivers to meet each individual patient's psychologic and physical reconstructive needs in order to rebuild what was lost.

As a recent transplant to Charleston, Dr. Ozhathil's journey has taken him across the country. He is proud to join MUSC, the only American College of Surgeons verified Level I Trauma Center and full-service Burn Center in the low-country region. Beginning with medical school, Dr. Ozhathil attended the University of Massachusetts in the Northeast. He went on to residency training in general surgery at the University of New Mexico in the Southwest, where he cared for a number of critically ill victims of penetrating trauma, burns and emergent surgical conditions such as soft tissue infections. Building upon this foundation, Dr. Ozhathil pursued fellowship training at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) and Shriners Children's Texas in Galveston, Texas – one of the nation's top combined acute burn surgery and surgical critical care programs. Always curious about things unknown, Dr. Ozhathil stayed on at UTMB to perform research to better understand the microbiome of the burn wound using next generation sequencing technology. His work has been published in a number of scientific journals and he has presented at regional and national medical conferences. Dr. Ozhathil is excited to join the nationally acclaimed team at the South Carolina Burn Center and passionate about using cutting edge technology to provide world-class care to improve wound healing for pediatric and adult victims of traumatic injuries.