the Thomas Jefferson University, School of Medicine, and holds the role of Executive Vice President for both Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health. Biography Early life and education Marino was born in Genoa to a Sicilian father and a Swiss mother and is the oldest of three children (he has two sisters). He graduated in Medicine and Surgery from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome. Medical career Board-certified in General and Vascular Surgery, he spent 4 years training in the 2 most prestigious transplant centers in the world: the Transplantation Institute of the University of Cambridge, England (then the only liver transplantion division in Europe), directed by Prof. Sir Roy Y. Calne. During his time in Cambridge, Dr. Marino published a paper on the reperfusion syndrome occurring during liver transplantion (Transplantation, 1985). The paper is still quoted today as a thorough study of this complex clinical syndrome; and the Pittsburgh Transplantation Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, directed by Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, the pioneer who in 1963 performed the first liver transplantion on a human being. In Pittsburgh, Dr. Marino completed an American Society of Transplant Surgeons approved multi-organ transplant fellowship under the direct leadership of Dr. Starzl and was hired by him as an attending physician and a Faculty member in 1991. Pittsburgh was then by far the most active Liver transplantation center in the world: for example, in 1990-1991 alone, more than 1,000 liver transplantion were performed at the Pittsburgh Transplantation Institute. In 1992 Ignazio Marino was appointed Associate Director of the National Liver Transplant Center of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs of Pittsburgh, then the only Liver transplantation department of the Government of the United States. Marino was a member of the surgical team which in June 1992 and January 1993 performed two baboon-to-human liver xenotransplants in a clinical trial coordinated by Starzl. In 1997 Marino founded the ISMETT (Mediterranean Institute for Transplantation and Advanced Specialized Therapies) organ transplant center in Palermo, Sicily. Marino was the CEO and the Director of ISMETT from 1997 until 2002, the first liver transplantion center in Sicily, founded through a partnership between the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the Ministry of Health of the Government of Italy Ministry of Health (Italy)of the :Category:Government of Italy. In 2001 he performed the first organ transplant in Italy on a person with HIV undergoing highly active antiretroviral therapy—a