Rauf Shahbazov, MD, Ph.D. has been appointed inaugural chief of the Division of Transplant Surgery at Albany Medical Centre, and the Neil Lempert Endowed Chair in the Department of Surgery.

Before appointment, Dr. Shahbazov worked at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, N.Y., where he served as the director of the Living Donor Kidney Transplant Program, surgical director of Pancreas Transplant Program, and the director of the Robotic Surgery Program.

Dr Shahbazov plans to expand upon the program’s strengths in access to transplantation and comprehensive care and develop its education and research missions.

Rauf Shahbazov MD, PhD, MRCS Ed, FEBS is a graduate of Azerbaijan Medical University. He is specialized in liver, kidney, pancreas transplantation and hepatobiliary surgery.

He completed a fellowship in transplant surgery at the University of Virginia Medical Centre in Charlottesville, Va., a transplant research fellowship at Baylor Transplant Institute in Dallas, and a transplant surgery fellowship at Bashkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He completed general surgery residencies at King Faisal Hospital in Al-Taif, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Clinical Hospital #5 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Rauf Shahbazov underwent long-term trainings in various clinics of Europe and the United States. In 2012, he was invited to the United States by the American Society of Surgeons.

He is a member of numerous professional societies, including the American College of Surgeons, the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, and the American Medical Association. In 2017, he started his social activity by establishing the Azerbaijani American Medical Association.

He is the author or co-author of dozens of articles in scientific journals. He is the author of the chapter on a living-donor liver transplant in the book Transplant Surgery. In addition to our native language, he speaks English, Russian, and Turkish fluently and knows Arabic.

It should be noted that, Rauf Shahbazov attended the Fifth Congress of the World Azerbaijanis, held in Shusha.