Dr. Robert Montgomery '82
Doctor of Science

Compelled by a love of medicine and a love of family, you have risen to the top echelons in medicine. Your numerous titles attest to your breadth of achievement in this arena: chief of transplantation, director of the Incompatible Kidney Transplant Program, director of the Comprehensive Transplant Center, and associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University and Hospital.

You are also president and medical advisor of the Montgomery Heart Foundation for Cardiomyopathy, established by your family in memory of your brother Richard '74, who died at age 35 from cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle that can be genetic.  Your father died from the disease and your brother Lawrence ’78, who also suffered with cardiomyopathy, received a successful heart transplant in 2003.  Your foundation supports genetic research to improve survival rates and find a cure for this devastating disease. 

After a distinguished tenure at St. Lawrence, during which you won a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to do medical research in Africa in the year following your graduation, Phi Beta Kappa, you earned your medical degree at the University of Rochester and your doctoral degree at Oxford, where you were a Fulbright Scholar. You have been affiliated with Johns Hopkins Hospital and School of Medicine in numerous capacities of increasing responsibility, and respect, since 1987.

The primary focus of your research in transplant biology is the development of innovative techniques to expand the live donor pool.  You have developed new and safer techniques, and traveled the world to help train surgeons in their use.  You are considered a world expert on kidney transplantation for highly sensitized and blood-type-incompatible patients. You invented a transplant organ external cooling system, and are co-holder of a U.S. patent for a method of controlling genes responsible for inherited disorders. 

For your creative and compassionate merging of the letter and the spirit of science in the quest to improve human health, St. Lawrence today proudly awards you the degree, Doctor of Science, honoris causa.