[MUSIC PLAYING] I'm John LaMattina. I'm an associate professor of surgery at the University of Chicago. I've been in practice for more than a decade.

When I was quite a bit younger, I was actually in the fire service and worked in pre-hospital medicine. And ultimately, as I was bringing patients to the hospital, I wanted to, rather than bring them to the hospital and stabilize them in the field, I wanted to provide them with definitive care. And ultimately, I felt like transplant surgery was the most definitive care you could provide to somebody.

My particular interest is in both living donor liver and living donor kidney transplantation, with a focus both on liver and kidney transplantation. In terms of living donor kidney transplantation, our group has really developed the largest series in the world with single port donor nephrectomy. While it's technically more demanding than the standard approach, we found that the donors prefer it. It allows them to have a smaller scar and, we believe, heal faster and get back to normal life faster.

In addition to the living donor kidney surgical procedure, I've developed an interest in living donor liver transplantation. Our group has done about 100 cases of living donor liver transplant. The last time this was reviewed, in my practice, we had the best outcomes for the recipient in the United States with one year recipient survival.

My general goal with really any patient interaction is to get people back to not worrying about their health and having their health be something that they participate in. But really, this is not at the forefront of their mind and at their home worrying about the same thing that everybody else worries about, rather than their liver failing or their kidneys failing. And really, the goal for both donor and recipient surgeries is just to get people home safely to their families.

For transplant, this is challenging, and it involves a lot of people. And I typically tell people, if they receive a transplant, 1,000 people will be involved in their care and in that effort to get them home, of which the surgeons play a part. But really, it's one part of many, many parts.

In particular, here at the University of Chicago, for me, this is really where it all began. This is really the first living donor liver transplant in the world happened here. And that history and that field strength attracts a lot of talented individuals, and it's really something special to be part of.

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