Dr. Charles Vollmer is an internationally renowned Professor of Surgery, Division Chief of Gastrointestinal Surgery, and Director of Pancreatic Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania.
He specializes in Pancreaticobiliary and other complex gastrointestinal surgery with a research focus in clinical outcomes assessment in high-acuity surgery – especially pancreatic fistula. He has authored over 225 manuscripts, 40 book chapters, and 3 books focusing on pancreaticobiliary diseases. He is active in multiple national and international surgical societies where he has served in various leadership positions including Membership Chairman, Program Chairman, Treasurer, President-Elect, and President of the AHPBA. He also currently sits on the Executive Committee of the IHPBA as its Treasurer and was its Scientific Program Chair for the 2016 World Congress in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He is the CoChair of the future IHPBA World Congress in Vancouver, Canada in 2028. He is a member of the American Surgical Society, Society of Clinical Surgeons, and the Surgical Biology Club II. He is a reviewer for numerous surgical specialty journals and is on the Editorial Boards of Annals of Surgery, British Journal of Surgery, Annals of Surgical Oncology, Surgery, HPB, the Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery, and sits on the National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s (NCCN) guidelines committees for both Pancreatic and Ampullary cancers. In 2008, he was honored to be the Josef Fischer Traveling Fellow in Academic Surgery for the Society of Surgery of the Alimentary Tract (SSAT) – an opportunity which allowed him to tour many of the top pancreatic surgical programs in Europe.
Dr. Vollmer’s collegiate education was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He then received his MD degree in 1994 from Jefferson Medical College in his hometown of Philadelphia. From there he received general surgical training at the Barnes-Jewish Hospital program at the Washington University of St. Louis where he was elected into Alpha Omega Alpha. He studied gene therapy as a surgical oncology research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the middle of his clinical training. After Chief Residency at Washington University, he matriculated to the internationally acclaimed Hepatobiliary and Solid Organ Transplantation Surgery Fellowship at the University of Toronto in 2001. He initiated his career as an attending surgeon at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School (2003 -2011). His current practice at Penn encompasses both malignant and benign conditions of the pancreas and biliary system with a strong emphasis in care of pancreatic cancer, cysts, and pancreatitis. He also serves as the founding Co-Director of the Penn Multidisciplinary Pancreatic Cyst Program.