Münci Kalayoğlu

Who is Münci Kalayoğlu?

Munci Kalayoglu is a Turkish physician.

In 1983, Dr. Folkert Belzer, Chair of the Department of Surgery at the University of Wisconsin, had the great foresight to offer a faculty position to a young Turkish surgeon, Dr. Munci Kalayoglu, then a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Kalayoglu accepted Dr. Belzer’s offer to join the UW surgery faculty as a pediatric surgeon and to establish a liver transplant program to complement the UW’s kidney and pancreas transplant programs.

Dr. Kalayoglu spent months preparing UW Hospital to become a liver transplant center, and performed the first liver transplant at the University of Wisconsin in July 1984. Since that time, he has built the UW program into one of the finest liver transplant programs in the country. He performed the UW’s 1,000th liver transplant on July 21, 2001.

Dr. Kalayoglu was born in 1940 in Ankara, Turkey. He received his M.D. from Ankara University Medical School in Ankara, Turkey, in 1963, and served his general surgery residency at Hacettepe University Medical School in Ankara from 1963 1967. He came to the United States to complete a surgical internship at Mount Sinai Medical School in New York City from 1967-1968 and a pediatric surgery residency at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh from 1968-1971. Following this, he joined the faculty of Hacettepe University Medical School in Ankara, becoming a full Professor of Surgery in 1977. In 1981 Dr. Kalayoglu developed an interest in the emerging field of liver transplantation. That year, he returned to the University of Pittsburgh as a visiting professor of surgery to study liver transplantation at the world’s premier liver transplant center under Dr. Thomas Starzl, the pioneer of liver transplantation. After two years of intense training in Pittsburgh, Dr. Kalayoglu accepted Dr. Belzer’s offer to initiate a liver transplant program at the University of Wisconsin and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.