CU Transplant Center

10/23/2026

Maureen, our amazing living liver donor, donated a piece of her liver to a stranger.

She shares the top 5 ways her life has changed as a living donor!

10/22/2026

October is liver awareness month so we asked our incredible hepatologists what gives them joy in transplantation!

10/21/2026

We are excited to welcome Keith S. Hansen, MD, to our Transplant Surgery team as Assistant Professor of Transplant Surgery.

Dr. Hansen brings a rare blend of surgical skill and engineering expertise. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Purdue University, where he helped create a design center for student inventors. He then went on to earn his medical degree from Indiana University School of Medicine. He completed his general surgery residency at the University of California, San Francisco, serving as chief resident, and spent a year during residency as a Biodesign Innovation Fellow at Stanford University. Most recently, he completed his fellowship with us as a Trafton-Snyder Fellow in abdominal transplant surgery.

Dr. Hansen's innovation work focuses on protecting donor organs during surgery. He founded Diatiro, a medical technology company developing the KidneyPod, a device designed to keep kidneys cool during implantation and support robotic transplantation. The KidneyPod has earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation, and with support from the National Kidney Foundation, grants, and investors, he has been awarded more than $9 million to bring it to patients.

Dr. Hansen's work has earned wide recognition, including the Young Investigator Award from The Transplantation Society, Best in Congress awards at the American Transplant Congress, and the grand prize award at the AST Cutting Edge of Technology and the SAGES Shark Tank competitions. He is also a dedicated teacher of medical innovation, lecturing for the Stanford Biodesign program and the IMD business school in Switzerland.

At CU Anschutz, Dr. Hansen aims to build a multidisciplinary research program focused on organ preservation, surgical innovation, and early graft injury. His vision for the Transplant Innovation Design Center brings surgeons, engineers, and scientists together to turn unmet clinical needs into practical solutions and rigorously evaluate their impact on transplant outcomes. He also plans to mentor residents and fellows in this work, helping them develop as surgeon-innovators.

Please help us welcome Dr. Keith Hansen to the team!

10/20/2026

We are pleased to announce that Katsunori Miyake, M.D., Ph.D., is joining our Transplant Surgery team as Assistant Professor of Transplant Surgery where he will care for patients undergoing kidney, liver, and pancreas transplantation.

Dr. Miyake's career began in Japan, where he earned his medical degree from Kyoto University and completed his general surgery residency at Shonan Kamakura General Hospital. After fellowship training at Tokyo Women's Medical University, Japan's largest transplant center, he returned to Shonan Kamakura to cofound its kidney transplant program. Over the next eight years, he led that program's growth into a nationally recognized center while mentoring the next generation of transplant surgeons.

His curiosity as a scientist has taken him from the operating room to the laboratory and back again. After earning his Ph.D. in kidney transplantation from Tokyo Women's Medical University, he came to the United States as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, where he studied islet transplantation, immune tolerance, and xenotransplantation. He then joined Henry Ford Hospital as a research fellow, examining how national allocation policies shape outcomes for liver transplant patients. This work was published in Transplantation and recognized among the Best of The Liver Meeting.

Most recently, Dr. Miyake completed the American Society of Transplant Surgeons fellowship in multi-organ transplantation at the University of Illinois Chicago. There, he performed hundreds of kidney, liver, and pancreas transplants each year and developed expertise in robotic-assisted transplantation. His clinical interests include living and deceased donor transplantation, minimally invasive donor nephrectomy, and dialysis access surgery.

We are fortunate to welcome a surgeon of Dr. Miyake's experience and range, and we look forward to all he will contribute to our patients, our trainees, and our transplant program.

Please give Dr. Katsunori Miyake a warm welcome when you see him!

10/19/2026

We are delighted to share that Maia S. Anderson, M.D., M.Sc., has joined our Transplant Surgery team as Assistant Professor of Transplant Surgery, where she will care for patients undergoing liver and kidney transplantation.

Dr. Anderson’s commitment to caring for vulnerable patients began well before medical school. After graduating cm laude from Harvard College with a degree in molecular and cellular biology, she spent a year coordinating childhood malnutrition programs in rural Ethiopia and Uganda with the Massachusetts General Hospital Division of Global Health and Human Rights. She earned her medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School, where she was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, and remained at Michigan Medicine for her general surgery residency. During residency, she spent two years in dedicated research as an NIH T32 fellow in aging research and as a health services research fellow at the Center for Healthcare Outcomes and Policy, and she earned a Master of Science in Health and Health Care Research. She then completed fellowship training in abdominal transplant surgery at Michigan Medicine, where she also served as a Clinical Instructor.

Dr. Anderson’s research focuses on how patients fare long after their operation is over. Her work has examined how frailty affects survival and quality of life after liver transplantation, the use of living donor grafts for liver retransplantation, and the long-term survivorship of children who undergo liver transplantation. She has also studied barriers to equitable access to transplant care, including how the COVID-19 pandemic affected transplantation for alcohol-associated hepatitis and whether transplant center websites are accessible to patients who don’t speak English. Her work has appeared in JAMA Surgery, JAMA Network Open, Annals of Surgery, Liver Transplantation, and Pediatrics.

A dedicated educator, Dr. Anderson has taught medical students and residents throughout her training and received the Bronze Beeper Award for Teaching Excellence from the University of Michigan Medical School.

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Maia Anderson!

10/16/2026

We are thrilled to announce that Tommy Ivanics, MD, MPH, has joined our Transplant Surgery team as Assistant Professor of Transplant Surgery. Dr. Ivanics will care for patients undergoing liver and kidney transplantation as well as complex surgery of the liver, pancreas, and bile ducts.

Dr. Ivanics's training has taken him across four countries. Raised in Sweden, he earned his medical degree summa cm laude from Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, before coming to the United States as a research fellow at Mayo Clinic, where he investigated patient-derived models of pancreatic and liver cancer. He completed his general surgery residency at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, which included three years of dedicated research at Toronto General Hospital, and concurrently earned a Master of Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His commitment to transplant and hepatobiliary care then brought him back to Toronto General Hospital for advanced fellowship training in multi-organ abdominal transplantation and hepatopancreatobiliary surgical oncology. Bringing his journey full circle, he is now completing a Ph.D. at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Dr. Ivanics’s research sits at the intersection of transplantation, cancer care, and data science. He helped develop a machine learning calculator that predicts the risk of liver cancer returning after transplant. He has also led large international studies comparing transplant practices and outcomes in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and his work has made a strong case for expanding living donor liver transplantation. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in journals including Hepatology, the Journal of Hepatology, Annals of Surgery, and JAMA Surgery. He has been honored with both the Vanguard Award and the Young Investigator Award from the International Liver Transplantation Society, and he is a frequent invited speaker on artificial intelligence in transplantation.

Please help us give Dr. Tommy Ivanics a warm welcome!

10/08/2026

Happy Hispanic Heritage Month from our amazing team! ❤️

10/06/2026

Meet Alyssa, a UCHealth therapist and an anonymous living liver donor.

Alyssa first learned about living donation in her early 20s while volunteering with hospice patients in Denver, many facing end-stage liver and kidney failure. The idea stuck with her. Then, in January 2025, she read a UCHealth story about Victoria, an anonymous donor who gave part of her liver through robotic surgery. That same day, Alyssa filled out the donor health survey.

Life got in the way, and she had to pause for nine months. But she never let go of the goal, using that time to focus on her health. When she came back in December 2025, the donor team welcomed her right back.

“If I have the capacity to do something to help someone else, I feel called to do that thing.”

Explaining it to her sons, ages 9 and 7, took some creativity. When she showed them a picture of the surgical robot, her oldest warned, “Mom, robots can turn on you.” Once he saw the surgeon at the controls, he rolled his eyes: “That’s not a robot. That’s like a race car.”

On June 10, Alyssa donated part of her liver. Six weeks later, she walked the Donor Dash 5K in Wash Park with her boys. Now, four months out, she sometimes forgets she had surgery at all.

One article. One reader. One decision that changed a life.

Now Alyssa is sharing her story for the same reason Victoria did, hoping it reaches the next person who’s been quietly wondering, “Could I do that?”

“I can’t do it again, but I would if I could. It was that positive.”

Maybe you’re that next person. Learn more about becoming a living donor, link in bio!

10/02/2026

For decades, Ramon Cordoba worked long days in the fields and late nights at the family laundry to provide for his family. Then stage 5 kidney disease changed everything, and the hardest part was learning to accept help.

The UCHealth Hispanic Transplant Program helped him get insurance and prepare for surgery. Now he's a transplant candidate, waiting every day for the call that a kidney is ready.

More than 95,000 people in the U.S. are waiting for a kidney. Read Ramon's story

https://www.uchealth.org/today/living-with-stage-5-chronic-kidney-disease-awaiting-kidney-transplant

Advanced kidney disease forced Ramon Cordoba to rethink the role he had played throughout his life. Accustomed to being a provider and working tirelessly for his family, he now faces a different challenge: waiting for a kidney transplant.

09/28/2026

In honor of Women in Medicine Month, we asked our incredible team to share their favorite part of being a woman in medicine!