Roberto Hernandez Alejandro

Dr. Roberto Hernandez-Alejandro is a liver surgeon and has been the Chief of the Division of Transplantation at the University of Rochester and Professor of Surgery since August 2016. He was formerly the Director of Liver Transplantation at Western University, Canada. He completed a transplant and Hepatobiliary (HPB) surgery fellowship from 2006-2008 at Western University, Canada. Subsequently, he received further training in live donor liver transplantation (LDLT) at the Kyoto University in Japan in 2009.

He has been a champion of organ donation throughout his career. Dr. Hernandez was a pioneer in utilizing donation after cardiac death organs to increase the number of livers available for transplantation. Under his leadership, URMC successfully restarted their live donor liver transplant program, performing over 40 operations in four years- a volume in the top twenty percent nationally. He has demonstrated his ability to grow a program by leading his team to double the number of organ transplants in just four years with the best survival rates in 20 years. He has recruited and mentored a diverse team of academically and clinically successful physicians and surgeons since being appointed chief at URMC. During the COVID pandemic, Dr. Hernandez led his team in creating flexible work options, activating a telemedicine plan for patients and most importantly, enabling the team to continue to transplant throughout the pandemic ensuring that patients had access to the gift of life.

In addition to his transplant work, Dr. Hernandez-Alejandro is heavily focused on liver resections for malignancies, and is one of only a handful of surgeons in the United States actively performing the associating liver partition and portal vein ligation for staged hepatectomy (ALPPS) procedure. Dr. Hernandez continues to innovate in the field of transplantation and liver metastases and recently opened a program on liver transplantation for unresectable colorectal liver metastases, the second active program in the USA.

Dr. Hernandez-Alejandro has more than 100 peer reviewed publications in the area of HPB and liver transplantation, including more than 10 per year in the last five years. He has been awarded with multiple internal and industry-sponsored grants for furthering innovative research in the field of liver cancer and liver regeneration. In September of 2019, he began his tenure on the editorial board of the Annals in Surgery, the highest impact factor surgical journal.

Dr. Hernandez-Alejandro is a committee member of many international societies including the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity committee at University of Rochester, President of the New York Consortium of Liver Transplant, as well as the UNOS Region 9 Representative Live Donor Liver Transplant, a member of the International Scientific Committee of the ALPPS Registry, Chair of the ILTS Education Committee, Chair of the AHPBA Publications Committee, Member of the Program Committee for the IHPBA, and member of the Program Committee of the American Transplant Congress. He has been invited multiple times as a keynote speaker to academic institutions to present on liver transplantation and hepatobiliary surgery.

He has dedicated a significant portion of his career to mentoring several academically successful hepatobiliary and transplant surgeons around the world.