I am chief of the University of Florida Division of Transplantation and Hepatobiliary Surgery and director of the UF Health Abdominal Transplant Program. Under my guidance, the Abdominal Transplant Program has become one of the busiest programs in the world and one of the lowest mortality rates for individuals waiting on a liver transplant. Here at UF, we take some of the most acute cases, often transferred from other transplant facilities, and those whose prognoses are poor – such as patients already in the ICU and on life support.

I attended medical school and completed a general surgery residency at the Lutheran University of Brazil in Canoas, Rio Grande do Sul. Thereafter, I relocated to San Paulo to complete a liver transplant fellowship in the liver unit at Albert Einstein Hospital and then to Indianapolis to pursue additional training in transplantation, completing an abdominal multi-organ transplant surgery fellowship at the Indiana University School of Medicine. During my time at Indiana University, I also completed an advanced fellowship in intestinal and multivisceral transplantation and studied genetically modified pigs in the IU Xenotransplantation Research Lab.

Prior to joining UF Health, I served as director of the living donor liver transplant program and transplant critical care fellowship program at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. There, I developed the hospital’s intestinal rehabilitation program and played a pivotal role in the development of the Miami Transplant Institute’s intestinal and multivisceral transplant program.