Chair, Surgery, Duke University, USA

• Speaker, Surgery Symposium, 17 Sep 2021    

Prof Allan D Kirk received his MD and PhD in Immunology from Duke University, USA, where he also completed his surgery residency. He completed a multiorgan transplant fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, where he began his longstanding work on costimulation blockade and personalised immune management. He advanced this work as Chief of Transplant Research for the Armed Services Transplant Service in Washington, DC, and subsequently as Chief of the intramural organ transplant programme at the National Institutes of Health. 

In 2007, he moved to Emory University, as Vice Chair for Surgical Research, and in 2014, he was appointed Chair of the Department of Surgery at Duke University, USA. He holds Professorships in Surgery, Pediatrics and Immunology and serves as a Surgeon-in-Chief for the Duke University Health System.

In addition to his clinical transplant practice, Prof Kirk has published over 300 scientific manuscripts, and continues NIH-, DoD- and FDA-sponsored investigations in organ transplantation and immune management. He has focused increasingly on the curation and analysis of multidimensional data for use in Real World Evidence trial design, clinical decision support tool development and drug discovery. He has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Transplantation since 2010, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine