Klearchos Papas, Ph.D., Professor of Surgery and the director of the Institute for Cellular Transplantation in the College of Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson and President-Elect of the Cell Transplant and Regenerative Medicine Society (CTRMS). He has devoted his research career to the application of engineering principles and the development of enabling technologies in the fields of cell therapy and tissue engineering with a focus on the treatment of diabetes. He has studied and utilized the properties of insulin-secreting tissue and their relationship to viability and function in the context cell therapies for diabetes with the objective of improving cost-effectiveness, availability, and clinical outcomes of this approach.

Prior to joining the University of Arizona in 2011, Dr. Papas served on the faculty at the University of Minnesota (2003-2011), where he held leadership positions as associate director of the Islet Transplant Program, director of Islet Processing Research and Development and director of the Islet Quality Assurance Core in the Schulze Diabetes Institute. Prior to that he held joint research positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) Center for Islet Transplantation at Harvard Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Yale University (1999-2003).

Affiliations: Dr. Papas serves on the council of the Cell Transplant and Regenerative Medicine Society (formerly Cell Transplantation Society). He also serves on the editorial Board of the journals: Cell Transplantation, Cell Medicine, Xenotransplantation and Cell R4.

Professor, Surgery, University of Arizona College of Medicine
Director of the Institute for Cellular Transplantation
Professor, Animal and Comparative Biomedical Sciences, BIO5 Institute
Professor, Department of Medical Imaging
Faculty, Biomedical Engineering Graduate Interdisciplinary Program
Faculty, Department of Radiology Graduate Interdisciplinary Program
Faculty, Physiology Graduate Interdisciplinary Program

Degrees
BE: Georgia Institute of Technology, Chemical Engineering, 1990
MS: Georgia Institute of Technology, Chemical Engineering, 1992
PhD: Georgia Institute of Technology, Chemical Engineering, 1996

Fellowship
National Institute of Advanced Interdisciplinary Research, Invited Speaker – Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan, Post Doc Invited Researcher, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Analytics/BioNMR, 1996-1999
Fullbright Scholar, 1986-1990