Joseph P. Vacanti

Joseph P. Vacanti, born on 31 October 1948 in Omaha, Nebraska, is an American pediatric surgeon and researcher who directs the Laboratory of Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication at Massachusetts General Hospital and holds the John Homans Professorship of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He trained at Creighton University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center, completed his surgical training in Boston, and specialized in transplantation at the University of Pittsburgh before working in the laboratory of Judah Folkman, where he began his long collaboration with Robert Langer. His research concentrated on biomaterials and surgical techniques that let engineered scaffolds carry living cells, and in 1988 he demonstrated a biodegradable polymer scaffold for cell transplantation. He is counted among the founders of tissue engineering, co-founded the journal Tissue Engineering and helped found the society that became TERMIS. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2001, served as surgeon-in-chief of the hospital's children's service from 2003, and led the American Pediatric Surgical Association from 2019 to 2020.