Sylvia Trent-Adams

Sylvia Trent-Adams (born June 15, 1965) is a retired U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps rear admiral, who last served as the principal deputy assistant secretary for health from January 2, 2019 to August 31, 2020. She previously served as the deputy surgeon general of the United States from October 25, 2015 to January 2, 2019. Trent-Adams also served as the acting surgeon general of the United States from April 21, 2017 to September 5, 2017. She retired from the U.S. Public Health Service on September 30, 2020 after over 33 years of combined uniformed service. On October 5, 2020, Trent-Adams was named to the board of directors for AMN Healthcare. On January 20, 2025, while serving as the president of the University of North Texas Health Science Center, Sylvia Trent-Adams was asked to step down, four months after an NBC News investigation uncovered that the center had failed to contact families before using their loved ones’ corpses for medical research. In September, NBC News published the first installment of a yearlong investigation into the Fort Worth-based Health Science Center’s practice of chopping up, studying and leasing out the bodies of the unclaimed dead — those whose family members often cannot be easily reached, or whose relatives cannot pay for cremation or burial. Over a five-year period, the center had received about 2,350 unclaimed bodies from Dallas and Tarrant counties and used many of them to train medical students; others it dissected and leased to outside groups, including major biotech companies and the U.S. Army, helping bring in about $2.5 million a year to the center. This was done without consent from the dead and, in many cases, without the knowledge of any of their survivors.