David Mulligan, MD, an acclaimed abdominal organ transplant surgeon from the Mayo Clinic and a passionate leader in organ donation, has been appointed chief of the Section of Transplantation and Immunology, director of the Yale-New Haven Transplantation Center (YNHTC), and professor of surgery at Yale School of Medicine.

Dr. Mulligan succeeds Sukru Emre, MD, a renowned adult and pediatric liver transplant surgeon who has served admirably since 2007 in leading Yale’s transplantation center, and who will continue at Yale as a professor. Dr. Emre turned the Yale transplant program into a regional leader in the evaluation and treatment of liver disease, and led the teams that provide liver, kidney, pancreas, and heart transplantation to patients from throughout the world. Dr. Emre will remain as a senior member of the transplant faculty, performing surgery and training residents.

Dr. Mulligan, who joined the Yale faculty on September 1, is also a liver transplant specialist with international acclaim for his work in living-donor liver transplantation. Dr. Robert Udelsman, chair of the Department of Surgery noted that, “Dr. Mulligan is not only a spectacular surgeon, but also an international leader in transplantation, and organ procurement and distribution. We were able to successfully recruit Dr. Mulligan due in large measure to the efforts of Dr. Kimberly Davis and the talented search committee that worked diligently to identify and recruit a world-class transplant leader.”

Dr. Mulligan spent 15 years with the Mayo Clinic in Arizona and, as a result, brings a wealth of experience, including his involvement in the establishment of a solid organ transplant program. He worked with a team that is famous for steroid-sparing immunosuppression, protocol biopsies to study early inflammatory markers that lead to chronic kidney damage, and the use of donor kidneys with acute kidney injury for successful transplantation. Collaboratively, Dr. Mulligan and his colleagues performed nearly 3,000 solid organ transplants with outstanding clinical outcomes.

As a researcher, Dr. Mulligan has been a principle investigator in multiple trials, including studies on diabetes mellitus and hepatitis C virus, as well as donor and recipient outcomes in living donor transplantations.

He is a devoted champion for organ donations on a national scale. This year he serves as chair of the Liver and Transplant Committee for United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). Dr. Mulligan is also councilor for the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, and is a member of the American Surgical Society.

At Yale, Dr. Mulligan will oversee a multidisciplinary team of physicians and caregivers who provide comprehensive care for adult and pediatric patients awaiting organ transplantation. The YNHTC is involved in cutting-edge research and is known for its excellent clinical outcomes. It is the only center in New England that performs over 100 kidney transplants a year, more than 40 percent of which involve living donors. The Yale Pediatric Liver Transplant Program, which led the nation in the number of pediatric living donor liver transplants in 2010, consistently ranks in the top three in the nation among all pediatric liver transplant programs in both patient outcomes and number of living donor transplants performed.