To: University Hospitals Physicians and Leaders
From: Jeffrey H. Peters, MD
Chief Operating Officer, University Hospitals
Date: April 26, 2017
I am pleased to announce that renowned liver transplant surgeon Kenneth D. Chavin, MD, PhD, FACS, has been named to lead University Hospitals Transplant Institute, effective May 1. 
As Director of the institute, Dr. Chavin will be responsible for strategic development and growth of our comprehensive solid-organ transplant programs. This is especially significant in light of our recent Medicare certification for the UH heart and lung transplant programs, plus recertification for the kidney, liver, and pancreas transplant programs. Dr. Chavin will maintain oversight for the clinical teams that perform these procedures using defined care paths to ensure the highest-quality outcomes. Additionally, he will oversee clinical and basic science research.
Dr. Chavin joins us from The Medical University of South Carolina, where he was Professor and Vice Chair of Research for the Department of Surgery. There, he served on numerous committees to improve transplant selection standards, operational performance, and clinical quality. He has also worked closely with the United Network for Organ Sharing to develop criteria and processes for liver-transplant allocation.
Dr. Chavin’s research findings are widely published, and he serves on editorial boards for Liver Transplantation and the American Journal of Transplantation. He also reviews manuscripts for more than a dozen scientific journals.
We are indebted to Christopher Siegel, MD, PhD, for his leadership and dedication to UH Transplant Institute. He was instrumental in securing CMS certification/recertification for all of our solid-organ transplant programs this year, and I am happy to report he will remain at UH to help build our hepatobiliary program.
Dr. Siegel, who came to UH in 1999, is a distinguished transplant and hepatobiliary-biliary surgeon who performed the first domino liver transplant in Ohio and participated in the first adult living-donor liver transplant in northern Ohio. Additionally, in 2014, he performed the first ALPPS (associating liver partition and portal vein ligation in staged hepatectomy) in Ohio and only the fourth in the United States.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Chavin to UH and thanking Dr. Siegel for his ongoing contributions to benefit our transplant patients.