Dr. Robert Mendez is a surgeon and former co-medical director of the Multi-Organ Transplant Center at St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. Along with his twin brother, Dr. Rafael Mendez, he also co-founded the National Institute of Transplantation (NIT) in 1984.

A graduate of Stanford University and the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, Dr. Mendez specializes in kidney transplantation and has participated in or performed over 5,000 kidney transplants since 1970. His dedication to the field of organ transplantation is preceded only by his dedication to each patient.

A world-traveler, Mendez has performed transplant procedures on patients all over the globe, and helped in the development of transplantation facilities in South America, the Middle East, North Africa and Japan. With the help from the Daughters of Charity and other physicians affiliated with NIT, he has also developed a program that enables under-served patients from other countries to receive transplant procedures at St. Vincent Medical Center.

He has addressed both the National Italian Parliament and the Japanese Transplant Society as an American representative to help them formulate national transplant laws. He has co-authored hundreds of scientific papers and articles, and has served as president for such organizations as the Los Angeles Urological Society, the Southern California Transplant Society, and SCOPC, now OneLegacy. In 1991, he was elected President of the United Organ Sharing Network (UNOS), our nation’s organ retrieval and allocation network. Most recently, Dr. Mendez was appointed to the National Institute of Health’s Advisory Committee on Xenotransplantation. This committee will advise the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on issues relating to the transplantation of living, non-human animal cells, tissues or organs into humans for therapeutic purposes.

Dr. Mendez is also a tenured Professor of Surgery and Urology at the USC School of Medicine.