Dr. Roh Yanagida joined the faculty of the UAB Department of Surgery as an associate professor in the UAB Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery in 2026.
Before arriving at UAB, Dr. Yanagida was an associate professor in the Division of Cardiovascular Surgery at Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he served as surgical director of the Heart Transplant Program and director of the ECMO Program. He joined Temple in 2019 after four years as surgical director of lung transplantation at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center in New Jersey. He began his faculty career in 2011 as an assistant professor in the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of Kentucky.
Dr. Yanagida earned his medical degree from Asahikawa Medical University and his Ph.D. in cardiovascular surgery from Tokyo Women's Medical University in Japan, where he also trained in cardiovascular surgery. He moved to the United States for a research fellowship in cardiothoracic surgery at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where he studied bioengineered heart valves, and went on to general surgery residency there and Drexel University College of Medicine. He then completed fellowships in thoracic surgery, followed by heart and lung transplantation and mechanical circulatory support, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
His research focuses on donor selection and donor-recipient size matching in heart transplantation, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation as a bridge to lung transplantation, and outcomes of mechanical circulatory support. He has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and has presented his work at the annual meetings of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, and the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation.
Dr. Yanagida is certified by the American Board of Surgery and the American Board of Thoracic Surgery. He is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a member of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation, the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization and The Transplantation Society. He serves as a reviewer for several journals, including the ASAIO Journal, Transplant International, and Artificial Organs.