The UAB Department of Surgery is honored to welcome Jacqueline Garonzik Wang, M.D., Ph.D., as director for the Division of Transplantation and co-director of the Comprehensive Transplant Institute.

Dr. Jacqueline Garonzik Wang has established herself as a foremost presence in transplantation research and best practices. Board-certified by the American Board of Surgery (ABS), the American Society of Transplant Surgeons (ASTS), and the Americas Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary Association (AHPBA), she specializes in liver, kidney, and pancreas transplantation, as well as living kidney and liver donation. Dr. Garonzik Wang completed her medical degree at Emory University, general surgery residency at Johns Hopkins University, and abdominal transplant and hepatobiliary surgery fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis.

“I’m excited to join UAB and work with the many talented individuals across the UAB enterprise to provide life-changing care to our patients,” says Garonzik Wang. “Together, we can continue to pioneer the field of transplantation across the Southeast and beyond.”

Author of over 240 publications and a field leader in kidney transplantation outcome improvement, Dr. Garonzik Wang’s research focuses on identifying novel strategies to increase rates of deceased and living donor kidney transplantation. This includes, but is not limited to, the utilization of normothermic and hypothermic machine perfusion to preserve and assess donor kidneys, expansion of donor acceptance criteria, and leveraging modalities, such as kidney paired exchange and desensitization, to expand access to transplantation.

Passionate about maximizing the utilization of kidneys available for transplant on a national scale, she was instrumental in creating the Incompatible Live Donor Kidney Transplant (ILDKT) registry early in her career and developing and advocating for the national implementation of the Live Donor Champion Program, two examples of numerous initiatives that have had significant impact on the national transplant landscape.

As a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, from 2016-2021, she served Program Director of the Abdominal Transplant Surgery Fellowship, Director and Training and Education for the Epidemiology Research Group in Organ Transplantation (ERGOT), and Assistant Program Director for the General Surgery Residency. Due to her exceptional accomplishments, she was promoted to associate professor in just three years.

In her tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she practiced from 2021-2025, Dr. Garonzik Wang served as the Surgical Director of the Kidney Transplantation Program and Core Investigator of the Wisconsin Surgical Outcomes Research Group (WISOR), among many other administrative and societal roles. As Director, she has pioneered the development and implementation of the Robotic Transplant Surgery Program, which launched in February 2025. In the clinical application of her research, Dr. Garonzik Wang has also led efforts to utilize normothermic machine perfusion to assess hard-to-place deceased donor kidneys and expand available kidneys for donation.