As MHSRS 2026 Opens, USU Research Looks to the Future Fight

Uniformed Services University researchers open MHSRS 2026 with military medicine work spanning battlefield readiness and brain health.

Uniformed Services University faculty, staff, and researchers took part in the 2026 Military Health System Research Symposium, Aug. 3–6 in Kissimmee, Fla. (USU graphic)

August 4, 2026 by USU External Affairs

More than 4,000 scientists, clinicians, and military leaders filled the Gaylord Palms Resort in Kissimmee, Florida, on Aug. 3 for the opening of the 2026 Military Health System Research Symposium (MHSRS). Researchers from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU) were among them, bringing work on battlefield airway care, brain health, and drug-resistant infection to military medicine’s largest annual gathering.

The opening plenary set the week’s agenda. Assistant Secretary of War for Health Affairs Keith Bass welcomed attendees to the conference, highlighting the roughly 70 breakout sessions and three poster exhibitions, and pressed the audience to turn discovery into care that reaches the warfighter. He tied the DoW’s research priorities to recent conflicts, pointing to drug-resistant infections coming out of Ukraine and the shift from the buried-blast wounds of past wars to the top-down injuries inflicted by drones.

Bass said those injury trends are why the DoW is standing up its Warfighter Brain Health 2.0 initiative, and he noted that USU and the Falk Foundation have already funded new clinical practice guidelines for managing penetrating brain injuries. He also described a new 15-minute, self-administered cognitive screening tool meant to catch changes in brain health early without pulling a medic off other tasks. 

Representatives from USU's Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress (CSTS) meet with attendees in the exhibit hall at the 2026 Military Health System Research Symposium in Kissimmee, Fla. (USU photo)

Looking further ahead, Bass argued that autonomous systems, robotics, and artificial intelligence will become medical force multipliers on a battlefield spread across vast distances. “The future isn’t something that we’re waiting for; it’s being shaped right now. Every test, prototype, and lesson learned brings us closer to delivering new tools that extend our reach and improve care in the most austere conditions.” Bass said.

He also pointed to ARMORR, USU’s newly integrated center for advanced research in military optimization, readiness, and rehabilitation, and its work on musculoskeletal health, one of the leading causes of lost duty days and medical non-deployability.

U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Clinton K. Murray, the Joint Staff Surgeon and a professor of Medicine at USU, followed with a history of combat wound infection that ran from antiquity to the present. Speaking as an infectious disease physician, he traced how the basics of wound care have changed little over 3,000 years, how antibiotics rewrote the odds in World War II, and how bacterial resistance answered almost immediately. Modern conflict has pushed the problem to a new extreme: rates of hospital-acquired infection that climb along the evacuation chain and now approach 100 percent in the prolonged, austere evacuations seen in Ukraine.

Murray credited the Infectious Disease Clinical Research Program at USU and its Trauma Infectious Disease Outcomes Study with bringing rigorous science to that fight, tracking bloodstream, soft tissue, and bone infections across the care system. He warned that multidrug-resistant and increasingly dangerous organisms will follow casualties into future wars, and that military and civilian systems will have to share patients’ infection status in real time.

His remarks closed on a patient. Daniel Robles, wounded in 2006, battled a staph infection and drug-resistant bacteria for more than eight years before recovering, summiting Mount Kilimanjaro, and watching his daughter earn a master’s degree. “That is the ultimate goal of the work done in this room,” Murray said.

Staff from USU's Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI) share their work with attendees in the exhibit hall at the 2026 Military Health System Research Symposium. (USU photo)

Rethinking How Medics Train for a Blocked Airway

USU researchers are challenging a long-held assumption about combat trauma training: that the smooth plastic mannequins used to teach life-saving procedures prepare medics for the real thing. New work suggests those models may instead build a false confidence that fails under pressure.

Presenting research funded through USU’s Tri-Service Nursing Research Program, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Andrea Hall laid out the stakes. Traumatic airway obstruction was the second-leading cause of preventable battlefield death during Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, and a retrospective analysis found that up to one in three emergency field cricothyroidotomies, a surgical procedure to open a blocked windpipe, failed in the pre-hospital setting.

Hall’s team put the question to 33 military nurse anesthesia students, comparing standard commercial task trainers against custom 3D-printed models built with realistic tissue layers and fluid-filled bleeding channels. On the simpler task trainer, students worked about 33 seconds faster and rated their confidence a little higher. Yet they rated the 3D-printed model more realistic and preferred it nearly two to one.

The order in which students learned turned out to matter most. Those who started on the 3D-printed model succeeded 97 percent of the time overall, while those who started on the task trainer succeeded only 84 percent. The takeaway, Hall said, is that speed on an easy model with exaggerated landmarks can breed overconfidence and mask a gap in real skill. “Our current emphasis on time-based outcomes may be detrimental and counterproductive for battlefield skill development,” Hall said.

The payoff is a medic who has already met realistic anatomy in training before meeting it under fire, when a blocked airway leaves only seconds to act.

Representatives from USU's 4D Bio³ Initiative showcase the center's research in the exhibit hall at the 2026 Military Health System Research Symposium. (USU photo)

Tracking Hidden Brain Injury

USU’s brain researchers brought hard data to the same problem Bass raised from the main stage. Dr. Michael Roy, a professor of Medicine and deputy director of USU’s Military Traumatic Brain Injury Initiative (MTBI2), presented early results from a study of blast overpressure and acceleration in the crews of high-speed combatant craft who fire heavy weapons, a project known as the BOATS study.

Using head- and body-mounted sensors and instrumented mouthguards, Roy’s team measured the pounding those crews take from both the water and their own weapons, then tested memory, balance, and eye function at baseline, right after operations, and up to 96 hours later. On the highest-exposure runs, with rapid-fire weapons, crews absorbed heavy cumulative blast and, immediately afterward, recalled nearly four fewer words on a standard memory test, with added sensitivity on pupil and balance measures. Crews in enclosed craft firing only rifles showed no measurable deficits. The variation was the point. “If you’ve seen one river training, you’ve seen one river training,” Roy said, describing how sharply exposure differed from one setting to the next.

One of the study’s simplest tools may prove the most useful downrange: a pupil-response test that takes seven seconds on a cell phone flagged blast effects with about 83 percent sensitivity. Validated further, it could let a corpsman screen a boat-crew member on the pier, before any symptoms show, and pull someone off the water before a second day of exposure stacks on the first.

Where Roy measured the living, Dr. David Priemer examined the brain itself. Priemer, an assistant professor of Pathology and associate director of the USU Brain Tissue Repository, presented a neuropathological study of nine service members with extensive military parachute histories, part of a repository now approaching 700 donated military brains. Using tissue staining that highlights scarring, his team found elevated astrogliosis, or brain scarring, across the base of the brain in all nine cases, with some showing cerebellar tissue loss, and one meeting the criteria for chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Priemer was careful about what the findings can and cannot say. The donors carried complicated histories, including contact sports and blast exposure, that make it impossible to pin the scarring on parachute landings alone. Still, the pattern lined up with the biomechanics of repeated hard landings, and he framed it as a starting point rather than a verdict. “I do believe we have a signal here,” Priemer said. For a paratrooper with hundreds of jumps behind them, that signal is the first step toward learning whether the landings add up to lasting harm.

By midafternoon, the day’s message was clear: capture the hard-earned lessons of past wars, build upon them, and transform them into the knowledge and capabilities needed to prevail in future conflicts.