New Surgeon Joins UA Department of Surgery Transplant Team
September 10, 2009
Tun Jie, MD, MS, assistant professor of surgery, has joined The University of Arizona Department of Surgery and the abdominal transplant team at University Medical Center.
Dr. Jie specializes in abdominal organ transplant and liver, pancreas and biliary surgery, and has expertise in laparoscopic and minimally invasive surgery. He has research interests in diabetes, pancreatic disease, islet transplant, transplant immunology and health informatics.
Dr. Jie received his medical degree from State University of New York (SUNY) Health Science Center at Brooklyn, School of Medicine, and later a master of science degree in health informatics from the University of Minnesota. His postgraduate training includes an internship and residency in general surgery at the University of Minnesota. He also completed, at the University of Minnesota, a research fellowship at the Diabetes Institute for Immunology and Transplantation; was a National Library of Medicine fellow in health informatics, Department of Health Informatics; and was a surgical infectious disease fellow.
He is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Distinguished Teaching Award and the David Gaviser Surgical Research Award from the University of Minnesota School of Medicine and the Young Investigator Award from the International Congress of the Transplantation Society. He has published more than 10 articles in peer-reviewed journals and about 30 abstracts at national and international meetings.
“We are very pleased Dr. Jie has joined our transplant team,” said Rainer Gruessner, MD, chief of abdominal transplantation and UA Department of Surgery chairman. “His exceptional surgical skills, along with his research expertise in the areas of abdominal transplant, will further enable us to provide the very best care for our patients.”
“I am delighted to join such a distinguished faculty at The University of Arizona. I look forward to being a part of one of the fastest-growing kidney, liver and pancreas transplant programs in the region and contributing to the newly developed intestine and islet cell transplant programs,” said Dr. Jie.
In 2007-08, UA surgeons performed 150 transplants – including heart, lung, kidney,
liver and pancreas transplants – the highest since the program began in 1979. In addition, the hospital recently began performing intestine transplants and islet cell transplants, providing insulin-producing cells to two patients this summer to control or eliminate their diabetes.
The UA Department of Surgery has been aggressively recruiting transplant surgeons since the arrival of Dr. Gruessner as the chair of surgery in July 2007. “We are expanding all our programs in solid-organ transplantation,” said Dr. Gruessner. “UMC is fully committed to becoming a world-class transplant institution, offering state-of-the-art care for patients of the region and beyond.”