President
Gerald Brandacher, MD

Dr. Gerald Brandacher is an associate professor of surgery and plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He serves as the scientific director of the Reconstructive Transplantation Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

His team is engaged in basic and translational research on donor-specific immune tolerance and immunomonitoring strategies for Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation (VCA) such as hand, upper extremity, and face transplants.

Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Dr. Brandacher was a key member of the hand transplant program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). He was instrumental in designing a novel cell-based immunomodulatory treatment protocol for composite tissue allotransplantation and was also part of the team performing the first bilateral hand transplant and first forearm transplant in the United States.

Dr. Brandacher has mentored 60 pre- and post-doctoral researches over the past 15 years, and has authored more than 180 peer reviewed papers, 27 book chapters, and has edited two textbooks on hand transplantation. In 2014, he co-founded the journal Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation (VCA), and currently serves as its Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Brandacher is the principal investigator of multiple major federal research grants on projects related to upper extremity transplantation, cell-based immune modulation, and tolerance induction. He has given over 130 invited lectures and has been a visiting professor around the world and at leading American medical institutions.

Dr. Brandacher has served as the President of the Austrian Society of Surgical Research (2008-2009) and as Chair of the American Society of Transplantation (AST) Vascular Composite Allotransplantation Advisory Council (2014-15). He was elected as Chair of the Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation Committee of the European Society of Organ Transplantation (ESOT) in 2015, and is a Founding Member of the American Society of Reconstructive Transplantation (ASRT), for which he currently serves as the President Elect. He is a Member at Large to the OPTN/UNOS Vascularized Composite Allograft Transplantation (VCA) Committee. In 2015 he was selected as a "Fellow of the American Society of Transplantation."