Johns Hopkins University Team
Gerald Brandacher, MD, FAST
(Partnering Principal Investigator)
Dr. Gerald Brandacher is scientific director of the Johns Hopkins Reconstructive Transplantation program and vice chair of research in the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. He is also a professor in the Departments of Surgery and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and serves as the director of interdisciplinary research and innovation for the surgical sciences at Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Brandacher has served as the President of the Austrian Society of Surgical Research (2008-2009) and as Chair of the American Society of Transplantation (AST) Vascular Composite Allotransplantation Advisory Council (2014-15). He was elected as Chair of the Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation Committee of the European Society of Organ Transplantation (ESOT) in 2015, and is a Founding Member of the American Society of Reconstructive Transplantation (ASRT), for which he currently serves as the President (2018-2020). He has been a Member at Large to the OPTN/UNOS Vascularized Composite Allograft Transplantation (VCA) Committee. In 2015 he was selected as a “Fellow of the American Society of Transplantation”. For this project, Dr. Brandacher served as Partnering Principal Investigator and provided leadership to the Johns Hopkins research team.
Carisa M. Cooney, MPH, CCRP
Carisa Cooney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She has been involved in clinical research for 20 years and is the research manager for the hand/arm transplant, face transplant, and penis transplant programs at Johns Hopkins. She is interested in patient-reported outcomes following reconstructive transplants and learning about the individual traits that help determine which patients may benefit most from these procedures. For this project, Carisa assisted with recruitment, the development of educational materials, and offered guidance to the Johns Hopkins research team.