Robert Montgomery, MD, PhD

As chair of the Department of Surgery and director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, I oversee a diverse team of medical and surgical specialists who provide a wide variety of surgery and transplantation services. I am well placed to talk about the skilled, compassionate experts at the Transplant Institute not only as its director—but also as someone who received a heart transplant here.

The structure of the Transplant Institute enables us to offer the most advanced patient care in a hospital that has earned top rankings for overall patient safety and quality from Vizient, Inc., formerly the University HealthSystem Consortium.

We are focused on bone marrow, heart, kidney, liver, lung, and facial transplantation. Our transplantation services have consistently led to outstanding patient outcomes. We are poised to introduce innovative programs I’ve helped to develop that will make us unique among New York’s transplant programs.

My primary goal is to use state-of-the-art innovations and technology to eliminate barriers that may be preventing people who need transplants from getting them. I was a member of the team that developed the laparoscopic procedure for live kidney donation. This minimally invasive procedure allows for a faster recovery after kidney donation and has become the standard throughout the world.

I also developed and performed the first “domino paired donation,” which is when two or more donors and recipients are paired in a kidney swap. This is often used when a donor and recipient have incompatible tissue or blood types. By bringing together multiple pairs of donors and recipients, we can ensure that all parties receive compatible organs.

I was the lead surgeon in the first 2-way, 3-way, 4-way, 5-way, 6-way, and 8-way domino paired donations and in the first 10-way open chain donation. In 2010, I was credited in The Guinness Book of World Records with performing the most kidney transplants in one day.

I am considered the world’s authority on desensitization—the process of readying patients to receive incompatible tissue or blood type transplants—altruistic donation, antibody-mediated rejection, and kidney-paired donation. I have performed more than 1,000 kidney transplants and am often referred patients who have the most difficult and complex situations. This includes people who have had multiple transplants, are difficult to match with donors, have been on dialysis for a long time, have clotting disorders, or are at a high risk for transplant rejection.

I trained in general surgery and multi-organ transplantation at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. My research focuses on stem cell therapies and gene- and cell-based therapies in transplantation. I co-lead a clinical trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health involving simultaneous donor bone marrow and live donor kidney transplantation. I also run multiple clinical trials for novel desensitization therapies.

I am honored to have received several awards recognizing my experience in patient care and research, including the American Society of Human Genetics’ Postdoctoral Basic Science Award, the Johns Hopkins Clinician Scientist Award, the Fujisawa Faculty Development Award from the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, the Champion of Hope Award from the National Kidney Foundation of Maryland, and the Terasaki Medical Innovation Award from the National Kidney Registry.