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A photo taken from the east end of the iconic crescent of the Hershey Medical Center and Penn State College of Medicine building, with a blue sky above it.

Gifted transplant surgeon remembered for kindness, empathy

Dr. Takehiko Dohi, faculty member in the Department of Surgery at Penn State College of Medicine since August 2017, passed away Sept. 25. He was a member of the transplant team who specialized in liver transplantation, live donor liver transplantation and complex hepatobiliary surgery.

A head and shoulders portrait of Dr. Takehiko Dohi.

Dr. Takehiko Dohi

From 1995 to 2001, Dohi began his career as an attending surgeon in Toranomon Hospital in Tokyo and then at Osaka Medical College in Osaka, Japan. Between 2002 to 2008, he pursued specialization in liver cancer research as a post-doctoral associate and instructor in cancer biology at Yale University followed by the University of Massachusetts. He returned to the United States in 2011 to complete a clinical training in transplantation at the University of Miami followed by a second fellowship specializing in live donor liver transplantation and hepatobiliary surgery at the Lahey Clinic in Boston. Dohi brought a combination of both bench research and a high level of clinical liver surgery expertise when he joined Penn State.

“Dr. Dohi’s passing is a tremendous loss to the Penn State Division of Transplantation,” said Dr. Zakiyah Kadry, chief of the Department of Surgery’s Division of Transplant Surgery at the College of Medicine. “Other than being a gifted and highly trained liver transplant and HPB surgeon, he was a close friend to many of us, a loving husband to Noriko and a loving proud father to his only son Toranosuke. We will miss his kindness and empathy, and the respect he showed to all those he encountered or worked with. The Penn State Health Department of Surgery and Division of Transplantation sends Dr. Dohi’s family our sincere and heartfelt condolences.”

In Dohi’s memory, an Education Trust Fund has been created for his son Toranosuke, who is currently a freshman at New York University, to help him achieve his dream of a career in medicine like his father.

To support this endeavor, personal checks payable to TORANOSUKE DOHI TRUST can be mailed to Carol Nye, Transplant Surgery, Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Department of Surgery, H062, 500 University Dr., P.O. Box 850, Hershey, PA 17033-0850.

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