Charles Vollmer

Dr. Charles Vollmer became the Director of Pancreatic Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 after initiating his career at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston where he served as an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He specializes in Pancreaticobiliary and other complex gastrointestinal surgery with a research focus in clinical outcomes assessment in high-acuity surgery. He has authored over 90 manuscripts and numerous book chapters focusing on pancreaticobiliary diseases. He is active in multiple national and regional surgical societies where he has served in various leadership positions including Membership Chairman and Program Chairman of the AHPBA, where he also sits on the Executive Committee. He is currently a reviewer for over 20 surgical specialty journals and is on the Editorial Boards of HPB, the Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery, and the Journal of Surgical Oncology. In 2008, he was honored as 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. He also has a sincere interest in medical education and has been a member of the BIDMC Resource Faculty (a dedicated institutional education task-force) as well as a Rabin Fellow in Medical Education. He has received numerous awards from Harvard Medical School for teaching both graduate and undergraduate students.

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. Following another dedicated year of translational research investigating the genetics of pancreatic cancer at the Samuel Leuenfeld Institute in Toronto, he took his first faculty position at BIDMC in 2003.

His current practice at Penn encompasses both malignant and benign conditions of the pancreas and biliary system with a strong emphasis in care of pancreatitis. He provides comprehensive care for patients with pancreatic cystic lesions and also provides education and screening for patients who are at high risk for developing pancreatic cancer. He also serves as Co-Director of the Penn Pancreatic Cyst Program – a coordinated multidisciplinary center for managing patients who have pancreatic cysts.