Professor of Transplantation Biology and Honorary Consultant Transplant Surgeon, Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

Professor of Transplant Surgery, University Medical Centre Groningen, The Netherlands.

Rutger J. Ploeg was born in The Hague in the Netherlands and educated at the University of Leiden. During his medical education he followed electives in Indonesia, Toronto and Cambridge. He was trained as a surgeon at the Leiden University Medical Centre. During his research fellowship in Madison at the University of Wisconsin with Dr. F.O. Belzer he became interested in organ donation, ischemia & reperfusion injury and preservation in transplantation. He was involved in the experimental studies and clinical introduction of the UW solution and received his PhD cum laude at the University of Leiden in 1991. After his clinical ASTS fellowship at the University of Wisconsin Hospital & Clinics, he was appointed consultant surgeon in 1994 at the University Medical Centre Groningen in the Netherlands and became a Professor of Surgery in 2001. He served the European Society for Organ Transplantation as Secretary and was elected President of ESOT in 2009.

Until May 2011 he was Head of the Division of Abdominal and Transplant Surgery in Groningen. In June 2011 he accepted a Chair at the University of Oxford in Transplantation Biology and works as Honorary Consultant Transplant Surgeon in the Oxford Transplant Centre. Recently he was appointed chair of the BRC Working Group Transplantation in Oxford and as National Clinical Lead for Organ Retrieval with NHSBT Blood and Transplant.

In the past decade Rutger Ploeg has intensively focused and published with his group on how the number and quality of donor organs and their viability can be improved.

He is currently coordinating a national consortium with NHSBT in the UK to investigate quality in Organ Donation and an international consortium in Europe to study preservation (EU7FW; COPE)