Transplant Surgeon Dirk van der Windt MD PhD Joins MUSC

Dirk van der Windt, M.D., Ph.D. is a fellowship-trained multi-organ transplant surgeon who joins MUSC on September 1. Dr. van der Windt’s clinical interests are in liver, kidney and pancreas transplantation in the adult and pediatric populations, general surgery in the transplant population, and dialysis access surgery. 

 

Dr. van der Windt completed his Abdominal Transplant and HPB Surgery Fellowship from the University of Michigan. He received his medical degree from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Concurrently with his medical education, he obtained a Master of Science degree in Clinical Epidemiology at the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences.

 

He pursued advanced training in transplantation biology and received his Ph.D. degree in Transplant Immunology with honors from Erasmus University. The majority of his Ph.D. research was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh, where he subsequently also completed his clinical residency training in General Surgery.   

Dr. van der Windt believes organ transplantation is the most meaningful area of medicine to work in as it provides a true cure for end-stage organ disease at higher and more durable rates than other treatments can offer. In addition, the shortage of donor organs will always fuel creativity and innovative research to investigate new ways to increase the number of available organs.

At MUSC, he will be part of the MUSC Lee Patterson Allen Transplant Immunobiology Lab, where he will work on developing ex-vivo treatment of the liver graft during machine perfusion. Currently, normothermic machine perfusion is being applied for organ preservation and quality assessment, but it is still greatly underutilized as a platform for treatment delivery to the liver graft. Treatment during machine perfusion could promote resilience against reperfusion injury and rejection, or to the recurrence of steatosis or fibrosis in the liver transplant. His overall goals are to provide the best possible patient care, and to develop new treatment strategies that increase the success of organ transplantation. 

He received various awards for his research, including an Emerging Liver Scholar Award from the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, a Young Investigator Award from the European Society for Organ Transplantation and most recently - the American Society of Transplant Surgeons Natera cfDNA  Faculty Research Grant. This research grant is intended to further explore the use of cfDNA and the ability to predict organ allograft function and outcomes. 

In his free time, Dr. van der Windt enjoys traveling and is an avid runner. He has completed marathons in NYC, Chicago and Paris, France.