I am Michael Millis. I'm a professor of surgery at the University of Chicago. I have been here since 1994. My specialty is hepatobiliary pancreatic surgery, which is a long way of saying liver, bile ducts, and pancreas surgery. I am a trained liver transplant surgeon. And for all of those years, I have been involved in the liver transplant program. For the past several years, I have focused more on my non-transplant hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery, so surgery of the liver or the bile ducts and the pancreas but without the transplant component.

I became a physician because I love taking care of patients and serving patients who have severe medical problems. And it kind of runs in my family. My maternal, well, my paternal great grandmother was a nurse midwife. My grandfather was a general practitioner in the hills of Tennessee. And my father was an obstetrician gynecologist. And so it kind of runs in our family that we like to serve patients when they have medical needs.

My philosophy of care is to kind of go deep and quickly into patients in their surgical problems. For the whole time I've been at the University of Chicago since 1994, I've taken care of very, very sick patients who need urgent care from a surgeon. And so I've been able to provide that care and allow many of their other medical problems to be taken care of by other specialists.

I have been involved in a number of different projects at the University of Chicago that have provided me new skills and new ways to think about things. I have been involved in research throughout my whole 29 years here at the University of Chicago, everything from cellular transplant and research to immunosuppressive trials, new surgical techniques, and even was the primary Western collaborator for the Chinese Ministry of Health to develop an ethical system and regulation for their transplant industry, including developing a voluntary citizen based organ donation system in China.

So all of those skills and aspects have been fun and exciting. But my heart fills with the joy that I can provide patients by helping them with their surgical problems.