Carson Phillips does not naturally talk about herself in grand terms. Her instinct is to step back rather than step forward. She thinks about the people around her first: the leaders she mentors, the coordinators and staff members she supports, the clinicians carrying the daily weight of transplant care, and, ultimately, the patients and families depending on all of them.
That instinct says as much about Phillips’ leadership as any title does.
“I like to support leaders and support our frontline teams that take care of patients,” says Phillips, senior director of transplant clinical operations at the UAB Medicine Comprehensive Transplant Institute and chair-elect of the National Transplant Leadership Council of the Organ Donation and Transplantation Alliance (The Alliance). “Everything is about the patient. And to make everything about the patient, we have to take care of the people who are taking care of them.”
It is a philosophy born partly from difficulty. Phillips began her career as a new nurse in a neuro intensive care unit during the recession of 2009, when jobs were scarce. She was young, newly married and working nights, caring for patients with traumatic brain injuries and strokes while struggling to adjust to the demands of the job and the schedule. She recalls feeling isolated and uncertain.
That experience became clarifying. She knew she wanted to stay in health care, but she also knew she wanted to help create a better environment for the people doing the work.
A transfer to UAB’s heart and lung transplant ICU changed the trajectory of her career. It was there, while pursuing graduate work in health administration, that Phillips found both transplantation and the model of leadership that still guides her. Her manager at the time, Jody White, became an early mentor, encouraging her ambitions, helping her navigate work-life balance and building the confidence she needed to stay in a demanding specialty.
That example stuck.
Phillips loved the complexity and intensity of transplant care. In the ICU, she saw the full arc of the work: patients being evaluated, patients supported with ventricular assist devices, patients who received transplants and those who never got one. She also saw the long-term impact. Some of the patients she cared for 15 years ago are still living with their transplanted organs today.
But just as important as the clinical work was the environment around it. The right mentor, she said, showed her what it meant to be supported in a hard job and what kind of leader she wanted to become.
That perspective now shapes her current role, where she oversees transplant coordinators, transplant assistants, program managers, advanced practice providers and the kidney and pancreas transplant clinic at one of the country’s large transplant centers. Her work is heavy on operations, strategic planning, outreach and regulatory readiness. She has responsibility for more than 100 direct and indirect reports. Yet when she describes the job, she comes back not to scale, but to people.
“My job is to support our people who take care of patients,” she says.
At UAB, that has translated into an emphasis on retention, flexibility and team culture. Phillips points with pride to the center’s strong staff retention, including transplant coordinators with decades of service. She believes that stability matters not only for team morale, but also for patient care. In her view, employee satisfaction and patient satisfaction are closely linked, and that relationship does not get enough attention.
Her leadership was tested in particularly stark ways during the COVID-19 pandemic. Phillips was eight months pregnant when the crisis escalated in early 2020, and she soon had to help guide operations remotely while preparing for maternity leave. She looks back on that period as one of the hardest of her career, but also one that confirmed the value of building systems that trusted staff and respected life outside work.
Because parts of the team already had some hybrid flexibility in place, UAB was able to adapt quickly. Over time, that approach helped create something Phillips considers essential in a field as intense as transplantation: a workplace where people can do high-stakes work well without losing the rest of their lives in the process.
“They can take really great care of patients, but also they don’t have to miss any of their kids’ ball games,” she says.
Phillips lives in Birmingham with her husband and two young sons and their border collie, Meb, named after long-distance runner Meb Keflezighi. A longtime distance runner, she has completed several half marathons and one full marathon, but these days, much of her time is spent getting her sons to sports practices and cheering them on at their games.
That belief in work-life balance and supporting professionals has shaped Phillips’ relationship with The Alliance. She first encountered the organization through a mentoring program after moving from bedside nursing into transplant administration and was looking for guidance. At the time, she said, she needed practical help. The Alliance provided an entry point, and then more than that.
She went on to serve on webinar faculty, joined the National Transplant Leadership Council and, after planning to rotate off after two years, chose to stay involved. Now, as chair-elect, she sees The Alliance as a venue for shared learning across roles and organizations.
In a time of regulatory change and operational uncertainty, she says, those connections matter more than ever. Listservs and one-off calls remain useful, but they are not the same as getting people in a room together to compare approaches, test ideas and work through implementation challenges honestly.
“There’s just something about meeting in person and having group dialogue that you’re not going to get on a listserv,” she says.
The Alliance serves as a practical educational resource for a highly specialized field that often has to generate its own expertise. In Alabama, Phillips notes, UAB is often the subject-matter expert. For Phillips, that is where The Alliance has been useful, both as a convener and as a source of scalable learning for teams across the field. “We now have a partnership with The Alliance, so our team members have access to all of their educational materials.”
Phillips is still investing in her own growth as well. In 2025, she was selected to participate in the UAB Medicine Institute for Leaders program. “I loved it because there was a great deal of leadership content and how it applies to UAB medicine. UAB has always been a tremendous organization for supporting the development of leaders and providing opportunities for leaders to grow.”
She recently began an MBA program, driven not by credentials alone, but by a desire to close gaps in her knowledge and strengthen the business side of her leadership. That decision reflects a larger pattern in her career: a consistent willingness to keep learning so she can serve her team and institution more effectively.
“I take a lot of pride in the work that I do,” she says. “I want to contribute, and to be able to do that I have to continue to grow.”
That forward motion feels consistent with the moment transplantation is in now. The field is being asked to adapt, collaborate and improve in real time. Phillips does not frame herself as the center of that story. She frames herself as someone helping build the conditions for others to do their best work.
It is a quieter kind of leadership, but an essential one.
In transplant, where so much depends on trust, coordination and resilience, the work of supporting the workforce is never secondary. It is part of the care itself. And for Phillips, that remains the point: strengthen the people, strengthen the system, and more patients stand to benefit.
