The Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) is amongst the 20 top-performing Universities in Europe. There are approximately 32,000 students registered in all fields of education. The faculty of Medicine provides a complete programme of teaching for medical doctors and all medical specialities, i.e. pharmacy, dentistry, physiotherapy and public health (6,500 students). On the same site, the University Hospital offers 1,000 beds for care in all medical specialities. The hospital specialises in transplantation and all types of transplant are carried out in both adults and infants (liver, kidney, pancreas, lungs, heart, bone marrow, bone, pancreatic islets and hepatocytes). UCL is still one of the oldest and largest centres in Europe, having carried out more than 3,800 kidney and 1,800 liver transplants. The integration between research in the field of transplantation and clinical application is therefore optimal.
Research interests
The laboratory of experimental surgery has for the last 20 years focused primarily on the field of transplantation immunology in large animal models (swine and primates) in both allo- and xeno-geneic fields.

Prof. Pierre Gianello
Prof. Pierre Gianello is born on November 5th, 1956 in Malmedy, Belgium. Awarded as Doctor in Medicine, Surgery and Obstetrics in 1981 at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL, Brussels, Belgium), he acquired his education in abdominal surgery at the Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc in Brussels (5y) and at the hospital de La Croix-Rousse de Lyon, France (1y). He completed his post-doc training (1991-1994) at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston (USA) in the Transplant Biology Research Center managed by Prof. David Sachs.
He obtained qualified teacher’s diploma of the higher education in 1996 by defending the thesis “Study of the mechanisms of tolerance to primarily vascularized renal allografts in swine miniature”. In 1997, he became head of the Laboratory of Experimental Surgery and Transplantation at University of Louvain (UCL) and in 2005, he obtained the title of full Professor at UCL. He was then elected Dean of Research from 2006 to 2009 and Vice-Rector from 2009 up to 2011. He is today the general coordinator of Research of the Health Sciences Sector at UCL, Brussels.
Professor Gianello is a prize-winner of about ten scientific prices (prizes) and is the author of 187 publications concerning clinical works and basic research published in national or international scientific journals.