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Keynote SpeakerChristian P. Larsen, MD, PhD
Joseph B. Brown Whitehead Professor and Chairman, Department of Surgery Dr. Christian P. Larsen received his medical degree magna cum laude from Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, in 1984 and his Doctor of Philosophy in transplantation immunology from the University of Oxford, England, in 1990. After completing his general and transplantation surgery training at Stanford and Emory, he was appointed to the faculty of the Emory University Department of Surgery in 1991. Dr. Larsen rapidly established himself as a leading transplant surgeon and immunologist and, in 2001, became the first Carlos and Marguerite Mason Professor of Surgery and the founding director of the Emory Transplant Center. In February 2009, he was appointed Chair of the Department of Surgery of the Emory University School of Medicine, Surgeon-in-Chief of Emory University Hospital, and Director of Surgical Services for Emory Healthcare. He currently holds the endowed position of the Joseph Brown Whitehead Professor of Surgery and maintains his role as Executive Director of the Emory Transplant Center. Dr. Larsen is an accomplished surgeon and scientist. His clinical practice focuses on kidney, pancreas and islet transplantation. In 2003, he performed the first islet transplant in Georgia. In addition to maintaining this busy surgical and clinical schedule throughout his career, he has built one of the foremost transplantation immunology programs in the world. His scientific contributions are evident in his high-impact publications. Dr. Larsen was the first to demonstrate the migration of Dendritic cells, so-called sentinels of the immune system, from the transplanted organ to the draining lymph node or spleen, where they initiate the immune response that causes allograft rejection. In a seminal publication in Nature in 1996, he provided unequivocal evidence that blocking T lymphocyte costimulation at the time of transplantation guarantees long-term survival of organ allografts in rodents. These findings were rapidly translated by Dr. Larsen's research group to primates and later to humans, and are currently a clinically proven treatment for recipients of solid organ transplants. His current scientific endeavors are focused on achieving immunological tolerance through the induction of mixed hematopoietic chimerism and on the application of costimulation blockers to facilitate transplantation of insulin-producing cells, islets, to treat type 1 diabetes. These endeavors, similar to Dr. Larsen's prior achievements, are distinguished by his talent to successfully drive a discovery from the bench to the bedside using the rigor of the scientific method. Dr. Larsen's excellence in transplantation surgery and immunology has been widely recognized. He has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the past 16 years. He is the recipient of a prestigious NIH MERIT award and has directed program project grants, center awards, and multi-institutional consortia from the NIH and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. He is an elected member of prestigious professional societies, including the Society of University Surgeons and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He is the recipient of both national and international research awards: the Basic Science Award of the American Society of Transplant Physicians (1997), the Roche Award of the American Society of Transplantation (2001), the Transplant Society's Roche Award for Excellence in Translational Research (2006), the Thomas E. Starzl Prize in Surgery and Immunology (2007), and the Emory School of Medicine Dean's Distinguished Faculty Lecture and Award (2009). |
