From Dr. Caprice Greenberg, Chair of the UNC Department of Surgery:
“I am delighted to announce that Dr. Chirag Desai has accepted our offer to serve as the next Division Chief of Abdominal Transplant Surgery and Executive Medical Director of the UNC Healthcare Center for Transplant Care, effective September 1, 2023″.
After completing his surgical training and practicing as an attending surgeon in Mumbai, India, Dr. Desai completed a fellowship in multi-organ transplant surgery and hepatobiliary surgery at Georgetown University. In addition to liver and kidney certification, he was the first fellow to be certified in small bowel transplantation by the American Society of Transplant Surgery. Upon finishing his fellowship, he joined the University of Arizona as an Assistant Professor of Surgery, where he helped to launch a new intestinal transplant program. A few years later, he returned to Georgetown University to serve as the founding director of the autologous islet cell transplant program and start a funded research program studying islet engraftment in different liver models.
In 2016, we were fortunate enough to recruit him to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as Surgical Director of liver transplantation and as Director of the Chronic Pancreatitis and Autologous Islet Cell Transplant Center. This center was awarded the National Pancreas Foundation Center of Excellence Designation this past year. Since joining UNC, Dr. Desai has been nothing short of extraordinary. He is admired and respected by his colleagues throughout the organization for his outstanding skills as a clinician. During this time, he has also published extensively in islet auto transplant, as well as liver transplantation, in such notable journals as JACS, JAMA Surgery, the American Journal of Transplantation, Transplantation, and Pediatric Transplantation. He is an outstanding academic surgeon and we are so fortunate that he will be leading our transplant program moving forward. Please join us in congratulating him on his new roles.
Read more about Dr. Desai and watch his video here.