Clarence Dennis (June 16, 1909 – July 11, 2005) was an American cardiothoracic surgeon best known for his work in pioneering cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB).
[2] Dennis went on to earn an MS in physiology and a PhD in surgery by 1940, and eventually became a full professor at the University of Minnesota.
Dennis was recruited to SUNY Downstate Medical Center in New York later in 1951 to chair the department of surgery.
After more than twenty years at SUNY, Dennis left in 1972 and went to work at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD.
He moved back to St Paul in 1991, and directed the University of Minnesota's Cancer Detection Center, founded by Owen Harding Wangensteen, the person who initially assigned Dennis the task of creating a pump oxygenator in the 1930s.