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Acclaimed Surgeon Dr. L.D. Britt Will Serve as Winter Commencement Speaker
Suffolk native is one only of five people awarded the American College of Surgeons’ Lifetime Achievement Award.
University News | June 25, 2025
Renowned surgeon L.D. Britt, MD, MPH, will serve as keynote speaker for ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉútv’s Winter Commencement in December, President Scott D. Miller has announced.
A native of Suffolk, Dr. Britt is one of the most accomplished and respected figures in American surgery and medical education. He is Vice Dean of Clinical Affairs in the Department of Surgery at Eastern Virginia Medical School, a division of the Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences at Old Dominion University.
“We are delighted to have Dr. Britt giving the keynote address at our mid-year Commencement exercises,” President Miller said.
The ceremony will be held on campus at 10 a.m. Saturday, December 13, in the Susan S. Goode Fine and Performing Arts Center and will be livestreamed on the VWU Digital Broadcasting Network.
A graduate of both Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Britt serves as the Henry Ford Professor of Surgery and Edward J. Brickhouse Chair in Surgery at EVMS. Among his countless awards and accolades is the American College of Surgeons’ Lifetime Achievement Award, presented to just five people in the organization’s century-long history.
Dr. Britt is past President of the American College of Surgeons, American Association for the Surgery of Trauma, American Surgical Association, and Society of Surgical Chairs; and past Chair of the ACGME Residency Review Committee for Surgery.
An active participant in the community, he has received numerous awards for public service, including the 2010 Colgate Darden Citizen of the Year Award and the 2011 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Leaders Award. In 2016, he was awarded the Urban League of Hampton Roads Professor Marian Capps Memorial Award for his accomplishments in community service through education. Ebony magazine has listed him as one of the most influential African Americans in the nation.
Dr. Britt is the author of more than 220 peer-reviewed publications, more than 50 book chapters and non-peer-reviewed articles and three books. In 2016, he was conferred an honorary doctorate at Howard University, along with President Barack Obama, activist and award-winning actor Cicely Tyson, and Ambassador Horace Dawson. That same year he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the first and only faculty member from his institution to receive this distinction.