Sara K. Rasmussen, MD, PhD

Sara K. Rasmussen, MD, PhD, is a pediatric transplant surgeon in the Department of Abdominal Transplant and Hepatopancreatobiliary Surgery. She serves as surgical director of Kidney Transplant, associate surgical director of Liver Transplant, and surgical director of Transplant Quality.

Dr. Rasmussen earned her medical and doctoral degrees from West Virginia University School of Medicine. For her doctoral work in microbiology, she was the recipient of a NCI Predoctoral Cancer Research Training Award, and she completed her research at the National Cancer Institute’s HIV Drug Resistance Program in Frederick, Maryland. She then completed her surgical residency at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Health System in Richmond, and had her first clinical encounters with Abdominal Transplantation at VCU’s Hume Lee Transplant Center. She then pursued and completed a pediatric surgery fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. In 2011, she joined the Department of Surgery faculty at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. After practicing for a year as a pediatric surgeon, Dr. Rasmussen then completed a fellowship in abdominal transplant surgery at the University of Virginia Medical Center. After the completion of her Abdominal Transplant Surgery Fellowship, she used her faculty position to lead the expansion of pediatric solid organ transplant services. Prior to joining Nationwide Children’s, she served as surgical director of liver transplant at Seattle Children’s Hospital. She has significant interest and experience in transplant quality improvement, and has served on the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) Pediatrics Committee and two working groups in UNOS that are striving to improve organ allocation for children. Currently, she serves as a member of the UNOS Members Performance and Standards Committee (MPSC). She has been a member of the Studies in Pediatric Liver Transplant (SPLIT) while at UVA, and also served as a member of the Starzl Network for Excellence in Pediatric Transplantation Executive Steering Committee, and a member of the Surgeon’s Working Group. In 2020, she represented Seattle Children’s hospital in the first-ever UNOS Cooperative Improvement Network (COIIN) focused on improving pediatric access to split liver transplant, and participated in a national webinar for transplant professionals in June 2021.

Dr. Rasmussen participated in the ASTS Joint Taskforce “Stand Against Racism” and has an interest in working to improve diversity, equity and inclusion in health care. She has served on the American Society for Transplant Surgeon’s Grant Review Committee. Her research interests leverage her doctoral training in retrovirology to study the role of human endogenous retroviruses in pediatric tumors and in ischemia-reperfusion injury in liver transplant.