Dr. Gerald Brandacher is an associate professor of surgery and plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He serves as the scientific director of the Reconstructive Transplantation Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

His team is engaged in basic and translational research on donor-specific immune tolerance and immunomonitoring strategies for Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation (VCA) such as hand, upper extremity, and face transplants.

Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Dr. Brandacher was a key member of the hand transplant program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). He was instrumental in designing a novel cell-based immunomodulatory treatment protocol for composite tissue allotransplantation and was also part of the team performing the first bilateral hand transplant and first forearm transplant in the United States.

Dr. Brandacher has mentored 60 pre- and post-doctoral researches over the past 15 years, and has authored more than 180 peer reviewed papers, 27 book chapters, and has edited two textbooks on hand transplantation. In 2014, he co-founded the journal Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation (VCA), and currently serves as its Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Brandacher is the principal investigator of multiple major federal research grants on projects related to upper extremity transplantation, cell-based immune modulation, and tolerance induction. He has given over 130 invited lectures and has been a visiting professor around the world and at leading American medical institutions.

Dr. Brandacher has served as the President of the Austrian Society of Surgical Research (2008-2009) and as Chair of the American Society of Transplantation (AST) Vascular Composite Allotransplantation Advisory Council (2014-15). He was elected as Chair of the Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation Committee of the European Society of Organ Transplantation (ESOT) in 2015, and is a Founding Member of the American Society of Reconstructive Transplantation (ASRT), for which he currently serves as the President Elect. He is a Member at Large to the OPTN/UNOS Vascularized Composite Allograft Transplantation (VCA) Committee. In 2015 he was selected as a “Fellow of the American Society of Transplantation”.

Dr. Rolf Barth is an professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the head of the Division of Transplantation and the director of liver transplantation at UM Medical Center. His clinical practice focuses on kidney, pancreas, and liver transplantation. Dr. Barth received his medical degree and surgical training at Duke University and continued specialty training in transplant surgery at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Barth also performed post-doctoral training in transplant immunology at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Dr. Barth has active clinical and basic research interests that include novel immunosuppressive therapies, immunologic tolerance, and the use of genetically engineered animal organs for human transplantation (xenotransplantation). Dr. Barth has an active lab investigating transplant tolerance and pre-clinical models of composite facial and limb transplantation towards the clinical goal of reconstructive transplantation. These efforts were part of one of the most-extensive face transplant performed worldwide to date.

* Adjusted for Daylight Saving Time (8 places).
Mon = Monday, January 27, 2020 (106 places).
Tue = Tuesday, January 28, 2020 (37 places).
Local time for Montréal: Monday, January 27, 2020 at 15:00:00
UTC (GMT/Zulu)-time: Monday, January 27, 2020 at 20:00:00
UTC is Coordinated Universal Time, GMT is Greenwich Mean Time.