Dr. Rodrigo Vianna

Rodrigo Vianna, MD, PhD, joined Jackson Health System in 2013 as the director of the Miami Transplant Institute (MTI), a unique affiliation between Jackson Health System and UHealth – University of Miami Health System. He is also MTI’s chief of liver, intestinal, and multivisceral transplant and the Andreas Tzakis Professor of Surgery at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Dr. Vianna began his career as a fellow at Jackson Memorial Hospital and returned to MTI after serving as director of intestinal and multivisceral transplantation at Indiana University School of Medicine, where he helped build the intestinal and liver transplant programs for children and adults. Dr. Vianna is a pioneer in intestinal and multivisceral transplantation. Since his return to Jackson, MTI’s patient survival rates and volumes for these types of transplants have become some of the highest in the nation. Dr. Vianna is also an accomplished liver transplant surgeon, making MTI’s liver program one of the best in Florida. He performs transplants with shorter operating times and minimal blood loss, which are indicators of better long-term outcomes. Under Dr. Vianna’s leadership, MTI was ranked the second-largest transplant center in the U.S. in 2018. Dr. Vianna earned his medical degree from the Federal University of Parana and a PhD in gastrointestinal surgery from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. After completing his general and gastrointestinal surgery training in Brazil, Dr. Vianna was selected for two successive fellowships at Jackson, the first in transplant research and the second in clinical transplantation, which he completed in 2003. Dr. Vianna has been nationally and internationally recognized for his leadership and scholarship. He was inducted into Brazil’s National Academy of Medicine, has received the Brazilian College of Surgeons’ Lifetime Achievement Award, and was granted the Livre-Docência designation by the University of Sao Paulo. He has authored or coauthored numerous journal articles and abstracts, and is a member of several medical societies.