Overview:

The demand for kidney transplantation continues to rise inexorably as its life-saving and life-enhancing benefits are strongly established. The supply of kidneys remains sorely inadequate both in quantity and, very importantly, quality. These two factors combine to exert tremendous pressure to accomplish transplantation by aggressively utilizing all available deceased donor organs. This webinar will consider donor, recipient, transplant, and other relevant factors, as well as their potential interplay, that enter into the critical decision of whether to transplant or not to transplant.

Biography:

Dr. Feng is a graduate of Harvard College, where she received the prestigious Marshall Scholarship. She utilized this fellowship to pursue graduate studies in molecular biology and received a doctorate from Cambridge University. Her medical training began at Stanford University School of Medicine, followed by general surgery residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School and abdominal transplant fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. As Professor of Surgery, Dr. Feng performs liver, kidney and pancreas transplants. Her teaching and mentoring responsibilities include leading the Abdominal Transplant Surgery fellowship program and guiding medical students, residents, fellows, and junior attendings in clinical and translational research.

With respect to research, Dr. Feng’s interests center on exploring mechanisms of spontaneous tolerance and approaches to induce tolerance in adult and pediatric liver transplant recipients. She is the overall principal investigator for numerous NIH-funded multi-center tolerance trials and serves as a site principal investigator for a diverse portfolio of other trials in both kidney and liver transplantation. She serves in a leadership capacity on the Executive and Steering Committees of the Immune Tolerance Network with responsibility for overseeing the Transplant portfolio.

As for other editorial and other professional activities, Dr. Feng has served as one of the 8 worldwide Deputy Editors for the American Journal of Transplantation and has just joined the editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine. She has held numerous leadership roles for the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, American Society of Transplantation, and American Association for the Study of Liver Disease. Recently, she has spearheaded a successful effort engaging the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) to conduct a study examining the ethical, regulatory, and logistical challenges that obstruct innovative research in deceased donors that can improve the quality and increase the quantity of organs available for transplantation.