New York, NY (May 16, 2018) Renowned transplant hepatologist John Bucuvalas, MD, has been named Professor, Vice Chair of Faculty Affairs, and Chief of the Division of Hepatology in the Jack and Lucy Clark Department of Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital. He will also serve as Director of Solid Organ Transplant Outreach for the Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute (RMTI) at Mount Sinai.

“We are ecstatic to have someone of Dr. Bucuvalas’s caliber and experience join our team,” says Sander S. Florman, MD, Director of the Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute. “This is a game changer for pediatric liver transplantation at Mount Sinai and his presence will benefit all pediatric liver patients in the tristate area.”

As a pediatric transplant hepatologist, Dr. Bucuvalas has advanced and extensive training in pediatrics and gastroenterology as well as a comprehensive understanding of liver diseases. This combination of specialty training enables him to effectively evaluate the youngest liver transplant candidates and manage their care both before and after transplantation. In addition, he has expertise in managing issues like immunosuppression and transplant-associated infectious diseases.
Dr. Bucuvalas’s primary research efforts, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), focus on clinical and translational work to define predictors of operational tolerance, to predict risk for and determine the mechanism of long-term structural liver allograft injury, and to define strategies to mitigate non-adherence in transplant recipients, an effort in which he works in close collaboration with Eyal Shemesh, MD, Chief of the Division of Behavioral and Developmental Health in the Department of Pediatrics at Mount Sinai.

He has published broadly on outcomes following liver transplantation, non-adherence, late liver graft injury, immunosuppression withdrawal, and functional outcomes of liver transplantation. He worked with the National Institutes of Health to conduct a one-day symposium on improving long-term outcomes for pediatric liver transplant recipients and was lead author of the symposium report, which recommended specific research efforts to improve long-term well-being, health, and survival for pediatric liver transplant patients. As Chair of Studies of Pediatric Liver Transplantation (SPLIT), he helped to lead a restructuring of the SPLIT data registry and organizational structure to meet the goals aligned in the NIH symposium report.

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