J. Michael Millis


James Michael Millis is an American academic and surgeon internationally renowned in pediatric and adult liver transplantation. He is Professor of Surgery and Vice Chair of Global Surgery at University of Chicago. He is also the director of Clinical Leadership Development Fellowship and Hepatobiliary Surgery at the University of Chicago Medical Center. He is known for developing new techniques of liver surgery that improved outcomes following liver transplantation and non transplant liver and biliary tract surgery.
Millis has written 300 articles and has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet as well as other peer reviewed journals. He has lectured at many universities and medical centers around the world. His research has dealt with immunology, cellular therapy, policy and ethics.
Millis received the Hippocrates Award in 2012, and the Global Citizen Hero Award from Red Cross and the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.

Education

Millis graduated with a B.A. in Chemistry and Political Science from Emory University in 1981. Later, he completed his M.D. from University of Tennessee in 1985 and joined the University of California at Los Angeles as a surgery intern. In 1987, he also started research in liver transplantation at UCLA, becoming the Dumont Transplant Fellow at the institute in 1992. At the same time, he was an Instructor in Surgery at UCLA. In 2014, he received an MBA from University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Career

Millis left UCLA in 1994 to join the University of Chicago as assistant professor in Department of Surgery, becoming associate professor in 1997 and professor in 2002.
In 1994, he also joined the University of Chicago Hospitals. In 1997, he was appointed the director of Pediatric Liver Transplant Program and Liver Transplant Program at University of Chicago Hospitals. He stepped down from the position of director at the Liver Transplant Program in 2006, being appointed again as the director of the program in 2014. From 2000 to 2016, he was the Chief of Section of Transplant Surgery at UCLA. In 2008, he founded the Transplant Center at University of Chicago Medical Center and led the center until 2016, stepping down to focus on his international efforts of improving surgical care and ethics, establishing the Global Surgery Program at the University of Chicago.
Millis has done significant work in the area of global surgery, hosting dozens of physicians and scientists from China and other countries around the world desiring experience in the United States. He developed the Clinical Leadership Development Fellowship program at University of Chicago that provides people from other countries the training to lead clinical health care enterprises. He has hosted dozens of Chinese students, residents and faculty at the University of Chicago to provide them with first-hand knowledge of the delivery of surgical care at leading academic health centers. He has also facilitated visits by US residents, fellows and faculty to Chinese centers to broaden their exposure and experience. In 2015, he was appointed the Vice Chair of Global Surgery at the University of Chicago.
In 2015, he became a senior faculty scholar at Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence and in 2017 a faculty member at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.
Millis serves on the editorial board of many scientific journals in the field of transplantation and surgery including World Journal of Gastroenterology and Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery. He is also the co-editor of Hepatobiliary Surgery and Nutrition.

Research

Since the beginning of his career in the late 1980s, Millis's research has been focused on liver transplant and developing innovate techniques for liver surgery. His research has dealt with immunology, cellular therapy, policy and ethics.
Most of his initial research studied patient care following a liver transplant and techniques for improving liver transplantation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he started focusing on Pediatric liver transplant, studying both the techniques of liver transplantation in children and outcomes of the procedure. During this time also conducted some research on liver transplant in the Asian population. In late 1990s, a lot of his work was focused on liver transplantation in children. Towards the beginning of 2000, he started writing about ethics in medical practice in general and liver transplant in specific.
Millis has also conducted researching exploring how cellular technology can be applied to patient care. He has organized many national and international conferences on the topics ranging from violence in healthcare to surgical research.

Healthy policy and ethics

A significant part of Millis's research has focused on policy and ethics in the field of health; and implementing ethical standards as the field of surgery becomes global. In 2006, he, with support of the China Medical Board, worked with Jiefu Huang, then the vice minister of health of China, to establish regulations governing the practice of transplantation in China and improve the outcomes and ethical standards of the transplantationin China. They initiated reforms that paved the way for banning transplant tourism and buying and selling of organs. They further established the requirements for transplant procedures including surgeon experience and ICU requirements.
Millis and Huang initiated a pilot program in China that allowed for voluntary organ donation. Upon the success of the program, it was expanded nationally. Later, in January 2018, the use of organs from executed donors was also banned in China. Their work changed the entire policy of transplantation in China. Millis also organized several conferences in China on the issues of ethics in healthcare in international settings.
In 2016, he helped the Peking Union Medical College Hospital in reforming their GME into a competency and milestone-based curriculum from their apprentice based system.

Honors and awards

Books