Robert Pol, MD, PhD, is an associate professor and transplant surgeon at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG). In 2012 he finished his PhD entitled ‘Outcome after Vascular Surgery in the Ageing’ and in 2013 he past the European Union of Medical Specialists (UEMS) exam and became an official Fellow of the European Board of Vascular Surgery (FEBVS). 

Since 2017 he is head of the department of organ transplantation and donation. His clinical work is concentrated around living and deceased kidney transplantation, pancreas transplantation and postmortem organ donation. Within Eurotransplant he has been a member of EPAC (Eurotransplant Pancreas Advisory Committee) and OPCC (Organ Procurement Chain Committee) and within the Dutch Transplant Foundation he is a member of the Dutch Organ Procurement Committee (LORUT) and Dutch Kidney Transplant Committee (LONT). His clinical research, for which he received several (unrestricted) grants, focuses on clinically applied science in the context of risk factors and vulnerability related to vascular and transplant surgical procedures (atherosclerosis, inflammation, sarcopenia) and imaging techniques (IL-2 PET, renal scintigraphy, CT/MRI).

He is the founder of the Dutch Kidney Transplant Study Group (DKTSG), a national collaboration between transplant centers in the Netherlands, focused on kidney transplantation research, from which several national projects have arisen. 

He is also founder and chair of the European Pancreas Transplant Research Group (EPTRC), a network of pancreas transplant centers to collaborate and bilaterally share data and initiate (clinically driven) research ideas. The EPTRC currently has 14 active participating centers throughout Europe. Within the UMCG he is board member of the Groningen Transplant Center and a member of the task force Transplantlines in which he is responsible for biobanking and biobanking related research. Currently he has (co)authored more than 140 peer-reviewed papers and recently has been awarded the UMCG innovation price.