A day after starting his job as chief of transplant surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Dr. Abhinav Humar stepped into an operating room to help with a liver transplant.
"What you need is not an administrator who can be a surgeon part time, but you need a surgeon who can be an administrator part time," Humar said Thursday during an interview at UPMC Montefiore. "When I go through a period of not doing surgery for three or four days, I get very uncomfortable."
Humar, 44, arrived at UPMC after it experienced a rocky period marked by the abrupt departure of former chief Dr. Amadeo Marcos and a polarizing study about complications in live-donor liver transplants. Transplant pioneer Dr. Thomas E. Starzl prompted that study, published this summer.
Humar is taking advice from Starzl, the retired surgeon who performed the world's first successful human liver transplant in 1967. The two met often when Humar arrived in Pittsburgh from the University of Minnesota Medical Center, which he called home for most of his 14-year career. Humar said he was enticed by the opportunity to work with Starzl when recruited.
"To be given the opportunity to come here and lead the program ... I think it's an honor and a privilege," he said. "That was probably my biggest draw to it, to take a place which is held in such high regard and to be able to come to it and put your mark on it."
Starzl said he has heard positive things about the new chief.
"It's pretty clear that everybody who's worked with him is impressed by his skills," said Starzl, 83.
Humar said he believes UPMC's success with transplantation will be measured not by volume but by how well its patients survive. Yet, he said, the hospital needs to perform a certain number of surgeries.
"Surgery is learned by repetition. The more you do, the better you get at it."
Born in Rajasthan, India, Humar moved to Ottawa, Canada, in childhood. He was studying surgery when someone suggested he learn organ transplantation to fill a void at the University of Ottawa. He went to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Colleagues there became his academic family. When Humar landed the Pittsburgh job, his superiors asked him to stay as chief of transplantation there.
But he followed a philosophy he teaches medical students: Focus on the present, not on what lies ahead.
"Concentrate on what you're doing now, and fate will lead you where you need to go," he said.
