Dr. Christian P. Larsen became founding director of the Emory Transplant Center and the first Carlos and Marguerite Mason Professor of Surgery in 2001.  He is nationally and internationally recognized as a leading transplant surgeon and immunologist, building and directing one of the foremost transplantation immunology programs in the world.

He received his MD degree magna cum laude from Emory University in 1984 and his Doctor of Philosophy in transplantation immunology from the University of Oxford, England, in 1990. After completing general and transplantation surgery training at Stanford and Emory, he joined the Emory University School of Medicine faculty in the Department of Surgery in 1991.

Dr. Larsen's scientific contributions are evident in his high-impact journal publications and in his ability to successfully drive discoveries from the laboratory to patient care. He was the first to demonstrate the migration of dendritic cells (so-called sentinels of the immune system) from a transplanted organ to the draining lymph node or spleen, where they initiate the immune response that causes allograft rejection.

In a seminal publication in Nature in 1996, he provided evidence that blocking T lymphocyte co-stimulation at the time of transplantation guarantees long-term survival of organ allografts in rodents. These findings were rapidly translated by Dr. Larsen's research group to primates and later to humans. Co-stimulation blockade is now a clinically proven treatment for recipients of solid organ transplants. His current scientific endeavors are focused on achieving immune tolerance to organ and tissue transplant through the use of mixed hematopoietic chimerism (bone marrow transplants combined with organ transplants).

Dr. Larsen is an elected member of prestigious professional societies, including the Society of University Surgeons and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He is the recipient of both national and international research awards: the Basic Science Award of the American Society of Transplant Physicians (1997), the Roche Award of the American Society of Transplantation (2001), the Transplantation Society's Roche Award for Excellence in Translational Research (2006) and the Thomas E. Starzl Prize in Surgery and Immunology (2007).