Many basic and clinical research opportunities are available at Washington University Medical Center.
The School of Medicine is one of the largest recipients of funding for research and training from the National Institutes of Health. The Department of Surgery is annually ranked among the top academic surgery departments in NIH funding by the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research.
The Department has approximately 61,000 square feet of laboratory space in three research buildings.
Fellows are encouraged to explore research opportunities in surgery, immunology, genetics and other fields of endeavor as well as to apply for extramural funding to support investigation into their own interests.
Research Mentors
The fellow has the opportunity to work with a transplant surgery research mentor. More information on each mentor’s current basic science research efforts can be found below:
William Chapman, MD
Dr. Chapman investigates novel methods to mitigate hepatic ischemia-reperfusion injury in the setting of liver transplant and resection. This includes the use of CD47 signaling blockade and machine profusion in rodent and porcine models.
Dr. Chapman also leads trials using normothermic machine perfusion to increase the pool of livers for human transplantation. This is currently in conjunction with OrganOx.
Jae-Sung Kim, PhD
Dr. Kim investigates novel therapeutic strategies to improve liver function after ischemia/reperfusion that occurs during transplantation, hemorrhagic shock and liver resection surgery. His major research emphasis is to understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms of autophagy that underly liver injury after ischemia reperfusion.
Yiing Lin, MD, PhD
Dr. Lin studies the epigenomic switches that controls how genes are activated/silenced in cells. Current efforts are to create roadmaps of how these controls function in normal tissue as groundwork to understand disease. These projects include ENCODE to create a map of human transcription factors binding, HuBMAP to create single-cell biomolecular maps, and CZI Seed Networks effort to identify genetic variants that modulate gene expression.
Learn more about Research in the Section of Transplantation.