Dr. Eliano Bonaccorsi-Riani, MD, PhD is a liver transplant surgeon in the Cliniques Universtaires Saint-Luc at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Brussels since 2016. Before that, since leaving in Brazil in 2003, he has worked in many transplant centers around Europe: Strasbourg in France, Barcelona in Spain, and lastly in London at the King’s College London where he completed his doctorate. During his PhD. he established and worked with different experimental models, such as acute liver failure, extended hepatectomies, and whole and reduced liver transplantation in rodents.
In 2018, the International Liver Transplant Society (ILTS) awarded him the International Liver Research Award. This marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with the Martins Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts and UC Louvain in Brussels. Since October 2022, he has directed the Laboratory of Experimental Surgery and Transplantation (CHEX) at UCLouvain, where he has implemented various experimental protocols, including experimental liver transplantation with hypothermic oxygenated perfusion in pigs and rats. He has been a member of the European Board of Surgery (EBS) since 2013, and in 2019 he was elected to the ILTS Basic and Translational Research Committee, where he served as chairman between 2024 and 2025. In 2023, he was elect board member of the European Liver Intestine Transplant Association – ELITA. He actively participates in the living-donor liver transplant program for adults and children at the Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc in Brussels. His main research areas include liver tolerance and rejection, ischemia reperfusion injury, organ preservation, machine perfusion, liver oncology, and living-donor liver transplantation.