Three Fellows Are Selected for TIME100 List of Influential People in Health

Last week, TIME magazine unveiled its list of the most influential individuals in health. Underscoring the role that surgeons are playing as healthcare leaders, three ACS Fellows were selected for the 2025 TIME100 Health List.

Stephanie H. Chang, MD, FACS, surgical director of the lung transplantation program at NYU Langone Health in New York was selected for her role as leader of the world’s first fully robotic double lung transplant. Dr. Chang performed the successful operation in Langone’s Transplant Institute in New York City in late October. The 57-year-old patient, who was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder in 2010, remains in good health. 

Additional operations have since been successfully performed, and the technique could represent a shift toward a safer, more minimally invasive standard of care for lung transplants.

Marty Makary, MD, MPH, FACS, chief of Islet Transplant Surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, was selected due to his confirmation as Commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Makary now leads this influential arm of the US healthcare system that regulates billions of dollars in medication, therapies, medical devices, and cosmetics. 

He is a prolific researcher and speaker on surgical quality and safety and was a key contributor to the safe surgery checklist that has been adopted by the World Health Organization.

Robert A. Montgomery, MD, DPhil, FACS, chair of the Department of Surgery at NYU Langone Health and director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, was selected as a long-time innovator in transplant surgery. Over his career, Dr. Montgomery has helped develop numerous improvements to transplantation, including laparoscopic live-donor nephrectomy, long-distance live-donor shipping of kidneys, and desensitization and paired-donation modalities, which his team then used to transplant more than 700 patients. He also advanced xenotransplantation by performing the first successful genetically modified porcine-to-human kidney transplantation in 2021.

Dr. Montgomery also was selected for the broader TIME100 list of influential people.