Critical Care Subspecialist and Abdominal Transplant Surgeon
Cape Town, South Africa

David Thomson is a critical care subspecialist and abdominal transplant surgeon at Groote Schuur Hospital and the University of Cape Town. His interests are medical education and deceased donation system improvement. He created the massive open online course Organ Donation: From Death to Life and the 2-day in-person Excellence in Deceased Donation and End of Life Care course to improve education around organ donation and good end of life care. He is a past President of the Southern African Transplantation Society, and a current council member for both the International Society for Organ Donation Professionals and the Transplantation Society where he chairs the TTS Ethics Committee. He led development “Creating a National Strategic Roadmap for Organ and Tissue Donation in South Africa” in collaboration with the International Society for Organ Donation and Procurement. He worked on the World Brain Death Project and is the lead author on the South African Guidelines for Determination of Death published in 2021. He currently heads the Transplant Centre of Excellence project at Groote Schuur and Red Cross Children’s Hospitals in Cape Town.

Chief, Centro de Trasplante Hepático y Cirugìa Hepatobiliar
Hospital Mexico

Senior Advisor Kidney SWT Swisstransplant

Dr Mueller received his medical degree in Marburg, Germany. His postgraduate training included internal medicine, intensive care, nephrology and three postdoc years at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. From 2004 to 2013, he had a clinical appointment at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, with a research focus on gene expression in renal transplantation.

From 2014 to 2023, he was lead attending at the University Clinic in Zürich, with key responsibilities for the transplant program and national kidney paired exchange. In the last 2.5 years he served as interim Head of the Nephrology University Clinic. Currently he works as Co-Chair for the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian group, as Senior Advisor Kidney for Swiss Transplant and part-time in a private nephrology practice. His research includes molecular diagnostics in transplantation and renal functional reserve testing.

TBA

Director, UCM Transplant Institute
Surgery, University of Chicago

John J. Fung, M.D., Ph.D. is the Director of the UChicago Medicine Transplantation Institute. Prior to that, he served as Chairman of the Cleveland Clinic Health System Center for Transplantation, as well as the former Chief of the Division of Transplant Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh. With over 30 years of involvement in abdominal and cellular transplantation, he is also an accomplished immunologist. Dr. Fung received his B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1975, followed by a Ph.D. in Immunology in 1980 and M.D. in 1982 from the University of Chicago. He completed his surgical residency at the University of Rochester, and a transplant surgery fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, under the guidance of Dr. Thomas Starzl. Between 1987 and 1988, he served as Director of Histocompatibility Testing at the University of Rochester. In 1989, he joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and held the tenured position as the inaugural Thomas E. Starzl Professor in Surgery. He joined the Cleveland Clinic in 2004 as the Chairman of the Department of General Surgery and Professor of Surgery at the Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western University. He also served as the Medical Director of Allogen Laboratory, one of the largest histocompatibility laboratories in the United States and oversaw transplantation services at five Cleveland Clinic facilities globally. In 2016, he was recruited to serve as the Director of the newly created University of Chicago Medicine Transplantation Institute. Dr. Fung is a member of numerous scientific and surgical societies and served as President of the International Liver Transplantation Society from 1997-1999. He is currently Secretary of the Transplantation Society. He has published over 1,000 articles and book chapters and serves on the editorial board for several medical journals. He is the immediate past Editor-in-Chief for Liver Transplantation, the highest impact factor specialty transplant journal. His principal research interests are in transplantation immunology, immunosuppressive therapies, and liver related immunology. In addition, he has received numerous prestigious lay and professional awards. His research interests are in transplant immunology, liver immunity, immnosuppression, and outcomes analysis. Dr. Fung is active in community affairs and is presently the President of The Transplantation Society. He received an honorable discharge from the United States Army Reserve Medical Corps with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He and his wife, Beth have four children: Justin, Lauren, Brendan and Shannon

Head: Transplantation Services
University of Cape Town, Groote Schuur Hospital

Prof Elmi Muller is the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Stellenbosch University. She is an international leader in the healthcare sector, Immediate Past-President of the international Transplantation Society (TTS) and International Chapter leader for the American College of Surgeons (ACS), and President Elect for the African Society of Organ Transplantation. She holds clinical as well as business qualifications in South Africa and England, as well as a fellowship in the USA. She had been the chair of the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian group, the South African Transplant Society and is currently participating in one of the Expert groups of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) , the World Health Organization Transplantation Taskforce and the Pontifical Academy of Science taskforce on Transplantation. Her board experience include experience with the American College of Surgeons South African Chapter (vice chair) as well as the South African Medical Association (SAMA) 2013-14 and the Organ Donor Foundation of South Africa (ODF) between 2007 and 2017. She had been on the steering committee for several local and overseas meetings and conferences and chaired the Educational online program for TTS in 2015. She holds an A1 rating for research with the National Research Foundation of South Africa.

Head: Consultant Emeritus
Renal Unit, Westmead Hospital

Jeremy Chapman is a Past President of TTS and was a TTS Councillor from 2000-2012. He is recent past Editor-in-Chief of the Transplantation Journals. He is a nephrologist in Sydney Australia.

Director, Department of Surgical Gastroenterology
Jaslok Hospital & Research Centre

Sanjay Nagral is a surgeon from Mumbai with practice focused on Surgical Gastroenterology, Hepatopancreatobiliary surgery & Liver Transplantation. Currently, he is Director of the Department of Surgical Gastroenterology at Jaslok Hospital & Research Centre, a tertiary care private charitable institution in Mumbai.

Assistant Professor
NYU Grossman School of Medicine, New York

Brendan Parent, JD, is director of transplant ethics and policy research, and assistant professor of bioethics in the division of medical ethics with joint appointment in surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He is Principal Investigator on nonprofit and government funded grants studying ethics and regulation of transplant research. Parent serves as an independent living donor advocate, an advisory board member for the National Kidney Foundation, and a member of the national donation leadership council for The Alliance. He provides ethics consultation for transplant and medical research programs across the United States. Parent’s current work also focuses on ethics challenges surrounding determination of death by neurologic criteria, research on the deceased, and big data and artificial intelligence in health research. He has published academic articles in peer reviewed journals spanning law, medicine, science, sports, and ethics, and his work has been featured in the Washington Post, The NY Times, Wired, hicago Tribune, The Guardian, and on NPR. Previously, he was a legal fellow for the New York Task Force on Life and the Law, the first Rudin Post-Doc in the NYU Division of Medical Ethics, and received his JD from Georgetown University Law Center.