Dr. Tullius is Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Transplant Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), and Director of the BWH Transplant Surgery Research Laboratory.

He trained at the Charité in Berlin, Germany, and received a Master of Arts from Harvard University. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed articles, has led numerous externally funded studies, and is a frequent invited speaker.

Dr. Tullius has greatly contributed to an improved understanding of the biology of organ transplantation. His more recent research interests include novel approaches to rejuvenate organs, immunosenescence, individualized immunosuppression, and the effects of metabolism on alloimmunity, as well as pioneering work in face, hand and uterus transplantation.

Dr. Tullius is an Executive Editor of Transplantation, Associate Editor of Transplant International, and has served as Associate and Consulting Editor of the American Journal of Transplantation. He has served on the Board of ESOT and was the founding Chair of the society’s Basic Science Committee. He has chaired several committees for the AST, was the founding Chair of AST’s Vascular Composite Tissue Transplant Committee and has organized several international meetings for TTS. Dr. Tullius currently serves as the Senior Treasurer of TTS, is a member of the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian group, and Vice President of the International Society of Uterus Transplantation. Dr. Tullius has received several awards including the Clinical Science Investigator Award of the AST, the Joseph E. Murray/Simon J. Simonian Mentoring Award, and the Excellence in Transplantation Award by the National Kidney Foundation.

Dr. Anthony “Jake” Demetris is the endowed Starzl Professor of Liver and Transplant Pathology, and currently Directs the Division of Hepatic and Transplantation Pathology along with the Shared Research Histology Laboratory facilities located at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Dr. Demetris joined the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1986 after attending medical school and completing his residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Dr. Demetris’ contributions have been noteworthy in all aspects of liver allograft pathology and clinical transplantation immunobiology, including drug development, acute and chronic antibody-mediated rejection, tolerance monitoring and multiplex labeling and automated image analysis. He completed > 480 peer-reviewed publications (google h-index: 126; 8/6/2020) and >250 invited speaker engagements and serves as a board member Banff Foundation for Allograft Pathology and an Editorial Board Member of the American Journal of Transplantation.

Currently, Dr. Demetris maintains active and robust clinical, consultation, and translational research practices that focus on all aspects of transplantation pathology and native organ diseases leading to transplantation involving the heart, kidney, liver, and intestines. He directs a translational research laboratory that hosts state-of-the-art morphological and molecular infrastructure for tissue specimen evaluation, utilizing multiplex labeling, automated image analysis, spatial RNA/protein expression and machine learning algorithms. The laboratory is funded by various government, corporate, and non-profit organizations. It focuses on evaluation of heart, kidney, and liver allograft biopsy specimens from various clinical trials involving the immunobiology of rejection, tolerance induction, and evaluation of new immunosuppressive agents and extra-corporeal machine perfusion devices.

Born in 1949 in a small village in Boyerahmad, southwestern Iran, Dr. Malek-Hosseini participated in a fellowship training program in liver transplantation in Pittsburgh, USA after graduating from Tehran and Shiraz Universities of Medical Sciences.

Since the beginning of his career, more than three decades ago, Dr. Malek-Hosseini’s major concern has been to establish the necessary infrastructures for a network in the region for the procurement of organs from brain-dead donors to put an end to organ selling in Iran and open avenues for transplantation of other organs. Currently, he is running the largest solid organ transplantation center in the world in Shiraz. It is affiliated with the Avicenna Organ Transplantation Institute, the largest charity foundation in the region. More than 96% of kidney transplantations performed in the center are taken from deceased donors, which is second to none in the world from a cadaveric donation rate point of view. The center set a new world record in 2017, performing 638 liver transplantations (93% from deceased donors). The center has also been devoted to training transplant surgeons from other countries, mainly MESOT states. The collaboration with other centers was fruitful and has so far resulted in the establishment of 12 transplant centers in Iran and other countries, and publication of hundreds of articles in international peer-reviewed journals.

Over the past years, Dr. Malek-Hosseini’s endeavors have been acknowledged with several national and international awards. Recently, in January, 2020, Dr. Malek-Hosseini was awarded the honorary fellowship of the American College of Surgeons. His vision is to promote the Transplant Center in Shiraz to an internationally recognized university in the forthcoming decade.

Throughout Dr. Jerzy Kupiec-Weglinski’s career in experimental organ transplantation, first at Harvard (1979-1997) and then UCLA (1997-present), a constant theme has been his dedication to, and success in, the training and education of fellows, residents, and students.

The evidence for his abilities as a mentor/teacher is his long list of Current Trainees (11); Pre-Doctoral Trainees (20); and Research Trainees (>40), most of whom have reached high academic ranks in immunology, surgery, and even as CEO’s of bio-companies, around the world. He had also mentored many clinicians (>30) at the beginning of their careers. This eventually resulted in them achieving major academic positions in the U.S., Japan, Germany, Switzerland, and Poland. Between 2006 and 2011, Dr. Kupiec-Weglinski served as a Mentor to Rising Star Awardees of the International Liver Transplant Society (ILTS) Congresses in Los Angeles, CA; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, New York, NY; Hong Kong, China; and Valencia, Spain. Dr. Kupiec-Weglinski’s education and mentoring efforts have resulted in a distinguished reputation for the Dumont-UCLA Transplant Center in the field of transplantation immunobiology as it has over the years been the source of multiple seminal publications. It also resulted in many prestigious scientific and educational awards for its fellows and faculty members. Four of Jerzy’s past Ph.D. mentees now hold faculty appointments at UCLA and run NIH-sponsored research programs. Dr. Kupiec-Weglinski, the inaugural Paul I. Terasaki Chair in Surgery, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, was the recipient of the 2018 TTS Award for Outstanding Achievement in Transplantation (Basic Science).