Meet Jason W. Smith, M.D., New Cardiac Surgeon at UCSF
Dr. Jason Smith, a native of San Francisco, has joined our department as a Professor of Clinical Surgery and as the Surgical Director of Heart Failure and Mechanical Circulatory Support. He is a cardiac surgeon with experience in ischemic and valvular heart disease, complex aortic surgery, endocarditis, and complex re-operative surgery. His primary career focus is on the surgical management of heart failure, cardiac transplant, and mechanical circulatory support.
In heart transplantation, Dr. Smith has been involved in increasing access to heart transplants through improving donor utilization. Some of these strategies have included the use of expanded criteria donors, ex-vivo heart perfusion, Hepatitis C donor initiatives, and using donors after cardiac determination of death. These efforts reduced waiting list times and improved access to transplants with excellent outcomes. Dr. Smith has also been a leading trial surgeon in mechanical circulatory support and has experience with all the Heartmate 3 and EvaHeart LVADs and the Syncardia total artificial heart.
Dr. Smith championed minimally invasive approaches to LVAD implantation and continues that effort to reduce the impact of surgery on patients. At both Washington and Wisconsin, he demonstrated his dedication to education by establishing advanced fellowships in thoracic transplant and MCS. His medical training was done in Chicago at Loyola University, where he completed medical school, a general surgery residency, a research fellowship, and his cardiothoracic surgery fellowship. He then returned to the west coast to Stanford University for an advanced fellowship in thoracic transplant and mechanical circulatory support. Afterward, he joined the surgical faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Before coming to UCSF, he served as the Surgical Director of Transplant and MCS at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Smith currently serves on the STS Endstage Heart and Lung Disease Workforce and on the Membership and Professional Standards Committee for the United Network for Organ Sharing.