Dr. Bruce Gelb, MD FACS is a clinical transplant surgeon who performs liver, kidney, pancreas, and living donor transplant surgery. He is a key member of the NYU Langone Health vascularized composite allograft (VCA) team and develops and manages immunosuppression regimens for face and hand transplant recipients leading to fewer and longer rejection free periods. His team performed the world’s first successful face/bilateral hand transplant in 2020, and most recently the world’s first partial face with whole eye transplant in 2023.
Dr. Gelb is the Vice-Chair of Quality in the Department of Surgery, medical director of the inpatient abdominal transplant and HPB unit, and the Surgical Director of Perioperative Services (Surgeon-In-Chief) in Manhattan for NYU Langone Health, overseeing 130 ORs in multiple locations where over 110,000 procedures are performed annually. He is at the forefront of numerous quality and safety initiatives leading to unparalleled safety in the management of hospitalized patients.
Dr. Gelb has served on national committees, including the OPTN Ethics and VCA Committees, the ASTS Legislative & Regulatory and VCA Committees, and is a current member of the UNOS VCA Committee. Regionally, he is a past-president of NYKidney, a consortium of New York State kidney transplant programs, and was instrumental in the passage of the NYS Living Donor Protection Act of 2018 and implementation of the NYS Living Donor Support Act which compensates for non-medical donor expenses.
Dr. Gelb focuses on ethics issues in healthcare and transplantation and has been at the forefront of many quality and safety initiatives within the NYU organization. He is the past-President of Directors of the Global Bioethics Initiative, as well as a Patient Advocacy group, both NGO members of the United Nations Academic Impact with special consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). He has addressed the UN General Assembly on transplant related issues.
