Robert A. Montgomery, MD, DPhil, FACS

Dr. Montgomery is the Chair of the Department of Surgery and director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, and a heart transplant recipient. The NYU Transplant Institute specializes in bone marrow, heart, kidney, liver, lung, and facial transplantation.

Dr. Montgomery has a long history of pioneering innovations that result in extensive impact on the practice of medicine. He was a member of the team that developed the laparoscopic procedure for live kidney donation which has become the standard of care. Dr. Montgomery conceived and performed the first “domino paired donation,” which amplified the power of paired exchange and set the foundation of all large scale paired exchange systems in the world. He 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, he was credited in The Guinness Book of World Records with performing the most kidney transplants in a single day.

Dr. Montgomery is 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. He also completed the first Xeno transplant when he transplanted a pig kidney into a human. Dr. Montgomery has performed more than 1,000 kidney transplants and is often referred patients who have the most difficult and complex situations including 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.

Dr. Montgomery has had clinical and basic science research supported by the NIH throughout his career. He has authored over 300 peer reviewed articles, cited more than 30,000 times and has an h-index of 94. He has received important awards and distinctions including a Fulbright Scholarship and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and memberships in the Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha academic honor societies. He has been awarded multiple scholarships from The American College of Surgeons and The American Society of Transplant Surgeons. The National Kidney Foundation of Maryland has recognized his contributions to the field of transplantation with the Champion of Hope Award, the National Kidney Registry with the Terasaki Medical Innovation Award and The Greater New York Hospital Association with the Profile in Courage Award. Newsweek Magazine featured him as one of America’s Greatest Disruptors in December 2021. He received the Liberty Science Center’s 2022 Genius Award. Modern Healthcare named him one of the Top 25 Innovators in Healthcare for 2022. Also in 2022, he was recognized by Crain’s New York Business as a Notable Health Care Leader. He received the 2022 American Association of Kidney Patients Medal of Excellence Award. The American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics named him the winner of the 2022 Paul I. Terasaki Clinical Science Award.