Profile
Rolf Barth
Professor
Department of Surgery
Rolf Barth serves as the director of liver transplantation and associate director of the University of Chicago Medicine Transplant Institute. His clinical practice focuses on kidney, pancreas, and liver transplant, with specific accomplishments in living donor kidney and liver transplantation. He has pioneered minimally invasive surgery for living kidney donation and has performed over 500 “scarless,” single-port laparoscopic donor nephrectomies. His research interests include novel immunosuppressive therapies, immunologic tolerance, and the use of genetically engineered animal organs for human transplantation (xenotransplantation). He has investigated transplant tolerance and preclinical models of composite facial and limb transplantation, which resulted in a successful clinical trial in face transplantation.
He received the Vanguard Prize from the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, as well as two Young Investigator Awards from the American Society of Transplantation. He is an elected member of the Society of Clinical Surgery.
Most recently, Barth was a professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he also served as head of the Division of Transplantation and director of Liver Transplantation and Hepatobiliary Surgery. He completed his medical degree and surgical residency at Duke University. He also completed a fellowship in transplant surgery at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and postdoctoral training in transplant immunology at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School.