Kassem Safa, MD Appointed Medical Director of the UCLA Kidney Transplant Program
The UCLA Department of Medicine has appointed Kassem Safa, MD, as medical director of the UCLA Kidney Transplant Program in the division of nephrology, effective September 1, 2026.
Dr. Safa is a transplant nephrologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and has served as a faculty member at Harvard Medical School for the past decade. He is widely recognized for his leadership and excellence as a clinician, researcher, and educator.
Dr. Safa received his medical degree from the Lebanese University and completed residency training in internal medicine at Yale–New Haven Health. He pursued fellowships in nephrology, transplant immunology and transplant nephrology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Dr. Safa served as medical director of the Vascularized Composite Allograft Transplant Program at Massachusetts General Hospital from 2017 to 2021. Since 2018, he has served as medical director for living donation within the Kidney Transplant Program, where he oversaw its transformative growth to the largest living donor and paired exchange kidney transplant program in New England.
Dr. Safa is actively engaged in research aimed at expanding access to living donor kidney transplantation, improving patient and graft survival and addressing complications of kidney transplantation. He is involved in NIH funded clinical trials examining the skin virome in kidney transplantation, the use of novel therapies for desensitization, and industry-sponsored studies targeting metabolic and infectious challenges after transplantation.
He is a fellow of both the American Society of Nephrology and the American Society of Transplantation. He serves as a reviewer and on the editorial board of multiple peer reviewed journals and has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications.
We look forward to welcoming Dr. Safa to UCLA and to his leadership of the UCLA Kidney Transplant Program as it continues to advance patient care, research and access to transplantation.
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