Prior to joining Emory, Dr. Knechtle was the director of liver transplantation and transplant clinical trials at the University of Wisconsin. He led a team that performed Wisconsin's first liver transplant from a living donor and the state's first combined liver/pancreas transplant. Dr. Knechtle is expanding Emory's liver transplant program by collaborating with colleagues in the departments of medicine, radiology, anesthesia, and surgery. His research, encompassing human clinical trials and non-human primate models, focuses on the immunologic mechanisms of transplant rejection and immunologic tolerance.

Dr. Cendales is trained in hand and microsurgery and transplant surgery. In addition to being a reconstructive surgeon, she is the director of the Emory Transplant Center's Laboratory of Microsurgery and Composite Tissue Transplantation (CTA). CTA is the re-transplantation of multiple tissues such as skin, muscle, bone, nerve, and tendon as a functional unit, and Dr. Cendales is working to advance this burgeoning discipline from the bench to the bedside. She helped to organize the first CTA team in the United States in Louisville, KY, and performed the first and second hand transplants in 1999 and 2001. Dr. Cendales is currently conducting the first clinical trial of CTA in hand transplantation.

Dr. Ford received her PhD in immunology and molecular pathogenesis at Emory and did her postdoctoral fellowship at the Emory Transplant Center. In Emory's Transplant Immunology Lab, she is studying the fundamental mechanisms involved in the T cell response to transplant tissues, specifically the role of costimulatory pathways in T cell activation, and the processes and interactions involved in immunologic tolerance to self and transplanted tissues.

Dr. Gangappa is investigating novel immunotherapeutic strategies for transplantation tolerance in non-human primate and murine models as well as mechanisms of viral latency and antiviral immunity in costimulation blockade-induced transplantation tolerance. He joined the division in 2003 after completing an ASM/NCID fellowship in the influenza branch of the CDC.

Before Emory, Dr. Hanish was a Clinical Instructor in Surgery at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. He earned his MS in biophysics and physiology and his MD from Indiana University School of Medicine, completed his general surgery residency and a research fellowship at Duke University School of Medicine, and did his transplantation fellowship at University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics. His clinical focuses are treating end stage liver disease and surgical management of primary liver tumors, and his research interests include genetic markers of cholangioarcinoma and outcomes of liver transplant patients.

A liver transplant surgeon with research interests in ischemia-reperfusion injury in hepatic allografts, transplantation for cholangiocarcinoma, hepatopancreatobiliary malignancy and outcomes analysis, Dr. Hewitt previously directed the Mayo Clinic's abdominal organ transplantation fellowship. He did fellowships in abdominal transplantation and endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatograph at the University of Western Ontario.

Transplantation in the HIV-positive population is one of the primary research interests of Dr. Hughes, who came to the department from the Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, FL, where he chaired the division of transplant surgery. Dr. Hughes performed the clinic's first domino liver transplant with Dr. J. H. Nguyen, its first in-situ split liver transplant with Dr. J. L. Steers and Dr. Nguyen, and the clinic's first organ transplant in an HIV-positive recipient.

Dr. Neal Iwakoshi received his PhD in immunology and virology from the University of Massachusetts Medical School and completed a three-year research fellowship at the Harvard School of Public Health. His primary investigational focus is the therapeutic manipulation of protein responses in transplant rejection and inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.

An internationally recognized surgical scientist and authority on transplant immunology, Dr. Kirk came to Emory from the NIH, where he was a senior investigator and the founding chief of the Transplantation Branch at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. He serves as a kidney/pancreas transplant surgeon at Emory University Hospital and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, with a primary appointment in the Department of Surgery and a secondary appointment in the Department of Pediatrics to facilitate novel transplant therapies for children.

Dr. Larsen's robust surgical practice focuses on kidney, pancreas, and islet transplantation and has seen him reach such milestones as the performance of the first islet transplant in Georgia in 2003. In addition to maintaining a high volume clinical schedule, he has built one of the foremost transplantation immunology programs in the world. After a nationwide search, Dr. Larsen was appointed Joseph Brown Whitehead Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Emory in February 2009, succeeding Dr. William Wood.

Dr. Mittler received his MS in microbiology and his PhD in immunology from the New York University School of Medicine and College of Dentistry. He was an associate editor for the Journal of Immunology from 2002-2006, an ad hoc reviewer for the NIH Experimental Immunology Study Section from 2001-2005, and a member of the Peer Review Committee of the U.S. Army Prostate Cancer Research Program from 1997-2001. Dr. Mittler's primary research focus is the study of mouse and human T-cell costimulation pathways that are essential for productive T-cell responses to foreign antigens.

Dr. Newell Newell was recruited from the University of Chicago, where he was director of kidney and kidney/pancreas transplantation. He has been listed in a variety of top doctors listings throughout the years; chairs the mechanistic assays subcommittee of Clinical Trials in Organ Transplantation, National Institutes of Health; and directs the Emory component of the NIH's Immune Tolerance Network, a nationwide alliance of transplant research centers conducting clinical trials designed to uncover the basic biological features of clinical tolerance.

Dr. Pearson and Dr. Larsen co-direct the department's internationally lauded Transplantation Immunology Laboratory, a partnership in which they have played a pivotal role in developing a new class of immunosuppressive drugs, the costimulation blockers. Dr. Pearson's current and past achievements include being the associate editor of the American Journal of Transplantation; a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Governors, Lifelink Foundation; sitting on the Board of Directors of LifeLink Healthcare Institute; and receiving the 2006 TTS-Roche Award for Excellence in Translational Science.

Before joining the department’s transplant immunology lab, Dr. Shires was the Technical Director of the NIAID Tetramer Facility at Yerkes, which provided custom synthesis and distribution of soluble MHC-peptide tetramer reagents for staining antigen-specific T cells. His primary research focus is the development of a method for tracking and studying specific populations of alloreactive T lymphocytes which mediate rejection of transplanted tissues and organs.

Dr. Tso earned his MD from the University of Maryland, completed his general surgery residency at Louisiana State University, did his fellowship in traumatology and critical care at the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems, and completed his fellowship in transplantation at Ohio State University. Dr. Tso's clinical and research interests encompass dual renal transplant, islet transplant, pancreatic transplant, live donor nephrectomy, and increasing the donor organ pool through such methods as hand assisted laparoscopic live donor nephrectomy.

Dr. Turgeon came to Emory in 2007 from the University of Massachusetts, where she had been director of kidney and pancreas transplantation. She specializes in adult and pediatric kidney transplants, pancreas transplants, laparoscopic living-donor nephrectomy, issues pertaining to immune response, and outcome analysis of transplant recipients.