Dr. Aaron Cunningham is a board-eligible pediatric surgeon in Charleston, South Carolina who maintains a comprehensive practice in pediatric general and thoracic surgery including the surgical care of neonates, pediatric surgical oncology, and minimally invasive surgery in children with congenital anomalies such as congenital pulmonary airway malformations (CPAM), esophageal atresia (EA/TEF), diaphragmatic hernia or a rare hepatobiliary disorder known as biliary atresia. He was trained with a highly-specialized focus in minimally invasive techniques for small neonates and believes in the comprehensive, multidisciplinary care of children with the goal of improving health over the course of a lifetime. Dr. Cunningham's treatment philosophy is to deliver the specific care that each individual child needs to allow them to live better over the course of their lifetime, as he would for his own family. With the state-of-the-art facilities available at the MUSC Shawn Jenkins Children's Hospital, he is dedicated to providing care, specific to children, that cannot be delivered anywhere else in South Carolina and beyond.
Dr. Cunningham was born and grew up in New York where he studied biological engineering at Cornell University. He developed an interest in medicine while working as a clinical neurophysiologist in Georgia and went on to attend medical school there at the Medical College of Georgia. Surgical residency brought him to the west coast where he trained at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. During his time there he developed an acute interest in pediatric surgery and completed a research fellowship in pediatric surgical outcomes. His research time was productive and predominantly focused on trauma induced coagulopathy in children and systems approaches to improving pediatric surgical care. Dr. Cunningham then completed his fellowship training in pediatric surgery at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University. The highly-specialized training that he received while at Stanford predominantly focused on minimally invasive surgical techniques in small neonates including minimally invasive approaches to esophageal atresia, CPAM, diaphragmatic hernia, and an advanced endosurgical technique called peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM), which was performed on children in only one other center in the country.
Dr. Cunningham joins MUSC as an assistant professor of surgery in 2023. He is passionate about the care of all children but maintains a clinical focus in a rare hepatobiliary disorder known as biliary atresia where the bile ducts form abnormally. He believes that complex diseases, like biliary atresia, are best managed in places where coordinated multidisciplinary care can be offered, like the MUSC Shawn Jenkins Children's Hospital. His research interests include biliary atresia, pediatric trauma and defining systematic barriers to improving pediatric surgical care through quality improvement.
