Robert Montgomery (physician)

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Robert Montgomery is an American transplant surgeon and the director of the Transplant Institute at NYU Langone Health. He was born in 1960 in Buffalo, New York, and was inspired to pursue medicine after his father died of heart disease. He earned an MD from the University of Rochester in 1987 and a PhD in molecular immunology from Balliol College, Oxford, as a Fulbright Scholar. He trained in general surgery and transplantation at Johns Hopkins and earned a DPhil in Transplantation Biology from Oxford in 1993. Montgomery joined Johns Hopkins as a surgeon, became Chief of the Division of Transplantation and Director of the Comprehensive Transplant Center in 2003, and led landmark kidney transplant operations, including the world’s first simultaneous triple swap kidney transplant. He was the inaugural Margery K. and Thomas Pozefsky Professor in Kidney Transplantation.

In 2016, Montgomery moved to NYU Langone Health to become the inaugural Director of the Transplant Institute. He helped develop a laparoscopic method for removing a living-donor kidney, which is now standard practice. On September 25, 2021, he performed the first genetically engineered pig kidney xenotransplantation to a human—the kidney, engineered to avoid rejection, came from Revivicor (United Therapeutics) and functioned for 54 hours in a ventilated, deceased-donor body. In 2023, he led the longest study of a pig kidney xenotransplant in a human to date, observing two months with good kidney function. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2023.

Montgomery is married to opera singer Denyce Graves; they have four children, and he has a transplanted heart. His favorite opera is Carmen.