Korkut Uygun

Korkut Uygun, PhD, brings a unique crossover between process systems engineering and surgery to the field of transplantation.

Dr. Uygun has built a major program for reengineering organs, specifically livers, which aims to ensure all donor organs are utilized for public good.

His PhD work focused on integrating process design and control, and identifying threat events for petrochemical process industries, specializing in model predictive control and dynamic optimization.

In 2006, he joined the Center for Engineering in Medicine as a postdoc for training on liver surgery and transplantation. In 2008, he won the National Institutes for Health (NIH) Pathway to Independence Award that funded his project to recover unusable organs for transplantation, and to predict graft survival success by developing metabolic models of the liver.

His laboratory features a vertically integrated transplantation program with small and large animal transplantation and human liver pseudo-transplantation, as well as mass spectrometry-based metabolomics and systems biology expertise.

Dr. Uygun’s lab is supported by the NIH, National Science Foundation (NSF) and Shriners Hospitals for Children, as well as industry with over $1M/yr funding. In order to focus on translation of the machine perfusion technologies developed in his lab, he has co-founded a company, Organ Solutions LLC, which is funded by two NIH small business grants.

He has published over 40 peer-reviewed works, which have been cited over 1,200 times since 2010.

Research Interests

cell physiological phenomena; donor selection; enzymes; gastroenterology; hepatocytes; hepatology; ischemia; liver; liver circulation; liver failure; liver transplantation; metabolic engineering; organ preservation; perfusion; systems biology; tissue engineering; warm ischemia

Companies

• Associate Professor Of Surgery Harvard Medical School (2018)
• Deputy Director of Research Shriners Hospital - Boston (2013)
• Founding Co-Director Cell Resource Core @ MGH (2011)
• Assistant Professor in Surgery(Bioengineering) Harvard Medical School (2011)
• Instructor in Surgery Harvard Medical School (2008 — 2011)
• Post-doc Fellow Harvard Medical School/ Shriners Burns Hospital (2006 — 2008)
• Post-doc Fellow Wayne State University (2004 — 2006)

Education

• PhD Wayne State University (2000 — 2004)
• MS Boğaziçi University (1998 — 2000)
• BS Boğaziçi University (1993 — 1998)