Dr. Jerzy Kupiec-Weglinski is a Distinguished Professor of Surgery, Pathology, and Laboratory Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. He holds the inaugural Paul Terasaki Endowed Chair in Surgery and serves as Director of the Dumont-UCLA Transplantation Research Center, as well as Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Surgery.
Dr. Kupiec-Weglinski graduated from Warsaw Medical School in Poland in 1975 and earned his PhD from the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1979. That same year, he began a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Surgery at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital at Harvard in Boston, Massachusetts, where he later advanced to the rank of Associate Professor. In 1997, he was recruited to UCLA to lead the scientific arm of one of the nation's largest liver transplant programs under Dr. Ronald W. Busuttil.
Dr. Kupiec-Weglinski, a translational physician-scientist, has dedicated more than four decades to advancing the field of organ transplantation. His research has focused on lymphocyte recirculation, immune tolerance, host sensitization, and ischemia-reperfusion injury.
Dr. Kupiec-Weglinski has authored more than 250 original peer-reviewed articles, 70 review papers, 35 book chapters, and two books. His work has been cited more than 25,000 times, with an h-index of 83 (Google Scholar). His research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health for over 30 years. He currently serves as Program Director of a UCLA-based Program Project Grant (P01) and as Principal Investigator on two R01 grants.
His professional service includes membership on the Board of Directors of the American Society of Transplantation, participation as a standing member of the NIH Transplantation, Tolerance, and Tumor Immunology Study Section, and ongoing contributions as an ad hoc reviewer for NIH and for Department of Defense panels.
Dr. Kupiec-Weglinski has received numerous honors, including the American Society of Transplantation Established Investigator Award and the Mentorship Award, as well as awards from The Transplantation Society for Outstanding Achievements in Basic Science and for Mentorship, Education, and Training. He serves on editorial boards and as a reviewer for leading scientific journals and is the Field Chief Editor for Frontiers in Transplantation.
In pursuit of more refined and personalized therapies, his laboratory pioneered translational research exploring the roles of the microbiota and bacteriophage therapy in liver transplantation, as well as advanced studies of vascularized composite allografts.