Appointed Joseph Brown Whitehead Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery, Emory University School of Medicine in February 2009, as well as surgeon-in-chief of Emory University Hospital and director of surgical services for Emory Healthcare, Christian P. Larsen, MD, DPhil, is an internationally recognized leader in kidney, pancreas and islet transplantation and transplant immunology. Dr. Larsen is also associate vice president and executive director of the Emory Transplant Center.

Dr. Larsen received his medical degree magna cum laude from Emory in 1984 and his Doctor of Philosophy in transplantation immunology from the University of Oxford, England, in 1990. After completing his general and transplantation surgery training at Stanford and Emory, where he was chief resident in surgery and a fellow in transplantation surgery, he was appointed to the faculty of the Emory University Department of Surgery in 1991. Dr. Larsen rapidly established himself as a leading transplant surgeon and immunologist and, in 2001, became the first Carlos and Marguerite Mason Professor of Surgery and the founding director of the Emory Transplant Center, an umbrella organization that oversees and integrates all of Emory's academic, clinical and research resources in organ transplantation.

Dr. Larsen's robust surgical practice focuses on kidney, pancreas and islet transplantation and has seen him reach such milestones as the performance of the first islet transplant in Georgia in 2003. In addition to maintaining a high volume clinical schedule, he has built one of the foremost transplantation immunology programs in the world. The Emory Transplant Center now includes 200 members who provide coordinated, patient-focused, multidisciplinary care and conduct multidisciplinary research.

Dr. Larsen is a frequent author of high-impact journal publications and is known for translating discoveries from the bench to the bedside. Together with long-time collaborator and friend Thomas Pearson, MD, DPhil, he has played a pivotal role in developing a new class of immunosuppressive drugs, the costimulation blockers. These studies have spanned 15 years, moving from mice to monkeys to humans. Poised to replace the cyclosporine class of drugs, costimulation blockers have the promise of being just as effective while avoiding the major side effects and toxicities associated with cyclosporine. Dr. Larsen's current scientific endeavors are focused on achieving immunological tolerance through the induction of mixed hematopoietic chimerism and on the application of costimulation blockers to facilitate transplantation of insulin-producing cells (islets) to treat type 1 diabetes.

Dr. Larsen has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health for the past 16 years, is the recipient of a prestigious NIH MERIT award and has directed program project grants, center awards and multi-institutional consortia from the NIH and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. He is an elected member of the prestigious American Society for Clinical Investigation and is the recipient of both national and international research awards, including the Basic Science Award of the American Society of Transplant Physicians (1997), the Roche Award of the American Society of Transplantation (2001), the Transplantation Society's Roche Award for Excellence in Translational Research (2006), the Thomas E. Starzl Prize in Surgery and Immunology (2007), and the Emory School of Medicine Dean's Distinguished Faculty Lecture and Award (2009).

Dr. Larsen's Chair's Message

Dr. Larsen's Faculty Profile

PDF of Dr. Larsen's CV

return to top