Robert A. Montgomery

Chairman and Professor of Surgery
NYU Langone Health

Dr. Robert A. Montgomery is the Chairman and Professor of Surgery at NYU Langone Health and the Director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute. He received his Doctor of Medicine with Honor from the University of Rochester School of Medicine.  He received his Doctor of Philosophy from Balliol College, The University of Oxford, England in Molecular Immunology as a Fulbright Scholar. Montgomery completed his general surgical training, multi-organ transplantation fellowship, and postdoctoral fellowship in Human Molecular Genetics at Johns Hopkins. For over a decade he served as the Chief of Transplant Surgery and the Director of the Comprehensive Transplant Center at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Montgomery was part of the team that developed the laparoscopic procedure for live kidney donation. He and the Hopkins team conceived the idea of the Domino Paired Donation (kidney swaps), the Hopkins protocol for desensitization of incompatible kidney transplant patients, performed the first chain of transplants started by an altruistic donor which has resulted in 10,000 transplants. In 2021, he led the team that performed the first gene edited pig-to-human xenotransplant and has performed 8 pig heart and kidney xenotransplants into humans.

Dr. Montgomery is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has authored over 330 peer-reviewed articles, cited more than 37,000 times and has an h-index of 103. Newsweek Magazine featured him as one of America’s Greatest Disruptors in December 2021. He received the Liberty Science Center’s 2022 Genius Award. Modern Healthcare named him one of the Top 25 Innovators in Healthcare. In 2024, he received The Transplantation Society’s Starzl Innovation Award and the prestigious Jacobson Innovation Award of the American College of Surgeons. He is a Chevalier of Ukraine having received the Order of Merit awarded by Volodymyr Zelenskyy on September 21, 2023 for his surgical care of Ukrainian patients during the war. He is credited in the 2010 Guinness Book of World Records with the most kidney transplants performed in 1 day.