The William Maul Measey Professorship of Surgical Research II

This Professorship was established in 2022, when the value of the endowment of The William Maul Measey Professorship of Surgical Research had increased sufficiently to support a second professorship. The original Professorship was established in 1971 through gifts from the Benjamin and Mary Siddons Measey Foundation in honor of William Maul Measey (1875–1967), an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania Law School Class of 1898. 

William Maul Measey, a distinguished corporate attorney in Philadelphia, created the Benjamin and Mary Siddons Measey Foundation in 1958 to honor the memory of his parents. Since the Foundation supports several colleges, universities, schools of medicine, and hospitals in the Philadelphia area, the Measey name has become synonymous with the furtherance of medical education in the region. 

Current Chairholder
James Markmann M.D.

James Markmann, M.D. is a board certified general surgeon with extensive specialty training in all areas of abdominal organ transplantation. He has a highly active clinical practice in liver, kidney and simultaneous kidney-pancreas transplantation. His special interests include: treatment of hepatobiliary malignancy, living-related and split liver transplantation, transplantation for Type I diabetes (pancreas and islet transplantation), and minimally invasive approaches to transplant surgery such as laparoscopic donor nephrectomy.

Dr. Markmann's lab works on basic Transplantation Immunology and has three general areas of interest: First, we are working on gene based strategies to improve graft survival. We have constructed viral vectors encoding immunosuppressive or immunomodulatory moelcules to impact the host response to allografts. Second, we have focused on characterization of a particular population of immunoregulatory T cells that are know to be critical for self-tolerance as a means to induce tolerance to an allograft. Finally, we have recently begun clinical trials of human isolated islet transplantation. A number of projects in the lab center on ways to improve the efficiency of islet function or ways to improve islet transplant success by inducing replication of islet cells or differentiation of beta cells form stem cells.