The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, the Department of Surgery and the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute are honored to present the 2026 Thomas E. Starzl Prize in Surgery and Immunology to Jan Lerut, professor emeritus of surgery, in recognition of his outstanding scientific achievements.
Lerut will deliver his talk, “The Art of Immune Suppression in Liver Transplantation - 40 Years of Personal Experience," on Wednesday, May 20, 2026, at 4 p.m. in Alan Magee Scaife Hall, Auditorium 3785 (third-floor entrance). A virtual option will also be available. To receive the Zoom link, please contact Amy Kapp.
From the start of his career, Lerut was involved in the fields of transplantation and hepato-pancreato-biliary surgery. He completed two years of fellowships at University Hospitals Saint-Luc in Brussels, Belgium; a North Atlantic Treaty Organization-fellowship fulfilled at the Centre Hépatobiliaire, University Paris-Sud; and at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He was director of the abdominal transplant program at Inselspital in Bern from 1987 to 1991 and was the director of the Starzl Abdominal Transplant Unit at UPMC and the Transplant Center of UCLouvain in Belgium from 1991 to 2016. His work in Belgium, Netherlands, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Poland and China gave him insight into the evolution and perception of surgery worldwide. His research interests focus on the development of technical refinements, oncology, vascular liver diseases, minimal immunosuppression and tolerance induction in the field of liver transplantation. His many invited lectures and study visits in China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan led to successful hepatocellular cancer-liver transplantation collaborations.
His career has been shaped by the principles of his mentor, Professor Starzl: integrity, investigator-driven research and “global, quality-of-life-based care” of the transplant recipient by integrating surgical and medical knowledge, as well as the concept of immunosuppression minimization.