NYU Langone Health and LiveOnNY Announce First-Ever Advanced Organ Donor Management Fellowship

Two Best-in-Class Organizations Collaborate to Begin the Process of Making Organ Donation its own Discipline in Healthcare

NEW YORK, Feb. 27, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- NYU Langone Health and LiveOnNY are pleased to announce the first-ever Advanced Organ Donor Management Fellowship in the U.S., designed to transform the field of medical education in organ donation. The initial funding for this first-ever fellowship is provided by the LiveOnNY Foundation. The $375,000 grant will support a medical trainee for three years as part of NYU Langone Health's resident fellowship program.

The fellow will participate in education, clinical rotations, and research within NYU Langone Health and LiveOnNY in the New York region, to create a teaching platform for best practices in organ donation collaboration across different care teams and various hospital settings. The fellow will be based out of NYU Langone Health. 

"This partnership with LiveOnNY will help build a knowledge ecosystem that can only be achieved through our commitment to continuous learning, which will help both the civic and professional communities transition the act of organ donation from life-ending to life-giving," said Robert Montgomery, MD, DPhil, the H. Leon Pachter, MD, Professor of Surgery, chair of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine Department of Surgery and director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute.

"The creation of this groundbreaking fellowship marks a significant step toward advancing the field of organ donation, with the hope that it will one day be recognized as its own discipline," said Leonard Achan, RN, MA, ANP, President and CEO of LiveOnNY. "Today, in the U.S., there is not a clinical branch in medicine for organ management and donation equivalent to cardiology, oncology, or orthopedics, for example. A clinical specialty in organ donation can create, advance, and expedite a best practice that will increase the numbers of lives saved by those who choose to give the gift of life to others. These life-giving heroes that are our families, friends, and neighbors deserve this investment and recognition."

This fellowship originated from a pivotal meeting in late 2022 between Achan and Dr. Montgomery, where they discussed innovative ways to advance organ donation and initiated discussions on establishing it as a distinct clinical branch. Just as emergency medicine was formalized as a hospital specialty in 1979 to address the unique complexities of critical care, this fellowship aims to transform the field of organ donation by fostering specialized training and innovation.

To learn more about the fellowship application, please contact Jeffrey Thomas at NYU Langone's Transplant Institute, at Jeffrey.Thomas@nyulangone.org.

About NYU Langone and the NYU Langone Transplant Institute

NYU Langone Health is a fully integrated health system that consistently achieves the best patient outcomes through a rigorous focus on quality that has resulted in some of the lowest mortality rates in the nation. Vizient Inc. has ranked NYU Langone the No. 1 comprehensive academic medical center in the country for three years in a row, and U.S. News & World Report recently placed nine of its clinical specialties among the top five in the nation. NYU Langone offers a comprehensive range of medical services with one high standard of care across six inpatient locations, its Perlmutter Cancer Center, and more than 320 outpatient locations in the New York area and Florida. With $14.2 billion in revenue this year, the system also includes two tuition-free medical schools, in Manhattan and on Long Island, and a vast research enterprise with over $1 billion in active awards from the National Institutes of Health.

The NYU Langone Transplant Institute offers the highest-quality kidney and lung transplantation programs in the nation, according to federal quality data, while the heart and liver transplant programs stand out in national survival rates and in their success getting patients off the waitlist faster. The institute performs over 600 organ transplants on average each year. NYU Langone's heart, kidney, liver, lung, and pancreas transplant programs are approved by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service (CMS), which means they have met the stringent volume, process, quality, and survival outcome requirements of CMS regulation.

About LiveOnNY

LiveOnNY is a nonprofit, federally designated organ procurement organization (OPO) dedicated to saving lives, providing comfort, and strengthening legacies through organ, eye, and tissue donation. The OPO, which was established in 1978, serves a culturally and ethnically diverse population of 13 million residents in New York City and Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Orange, Putnam, Dutchess, and Rockland counties. Working closely with donor hospital and transplant centers, LiveOnNY coordinates organ, eye, and tissue donation for transplant, educates the public and healthcare professionals about donation, and promotes the importance of signing up on the National or New York State Donate Life Registry. LiveOnNY is a member of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which oversees the organ transplant waiting list in the U.S. For more information, please visit LiveOnNY.org.

Media Inquiries

NYU Langone Health
Colin DeVries
Phone: 212-404-3588
Colin.DeVries@NYULangone.org

LiveOnNY
Dorie Klissas
Phone: 917-287-5643
dklissas@liveonny.org

SOURCE NYU Langone Health