Joseph Vacanti is an American pediatric surgeon and researcher who is the director of the Laboratory of Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication at Massachusetts General Hospital.
[10] He pursued additional training in the lab of cancer biologist Judah Folkman from 1977-1979[11] where he met frequent collaborator Robert Langer.
[12] He was appointed surgeon-in-chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital for Children in 2003[13] and was the president of the American Pediatric Surgical Association from 2019-2020.
He co-founded the journal Tissue Engineering[19] and was the founding president of the Tissue Engineering Society (which evolved into TERMIS), co-founded in 1994 with Charles Vacanti, Joseph Upton of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Tony Atala of Boston Children’s Hospital, Mark Randolph of the Massachusetts General Hospital and Linda Griffith of MIT.
[21] In his lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Vacanti advised or co-advised many prominent researchers in the field, including David J. Mooney and Antonios Mikos.