Linda Carime Cendales MD

Dr. Cendales, the only person in the United States to have completed formal fellowship training in both Hand and Microsurgery and Transplant Surgery, is a Duke Health Scholar and the Director of the Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation (VCA) at Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Cendales helped organize the first VCA team in the U.S. and participated in the country’s first two-hand transplants. She was subsequently the first surgeon accepted into the Transplant Surgery and Immunobiology Fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Prior to joining Duke, Dr. Cendales established the VCA program at Emory University and led the multi-disciplinary team that performed Georgia's first-hand transplant in March 2011. While at Duke, she established the VCA program and led the multi-disciplinary team that performed North Carolina’s first unilateral and the first bilateral hand transplants in May 2016 and in November 2018 respectively.

Dr. Cendales is the Principal Investigator of clinical and translational studies in VCA funded by the Department of Defense. Dr. Cendales is the Immediate Past-President of the International Society of Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation Society (ISVCA), the Chair of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network / United Network for Organ Sharing (OPTN/UNOS)Vascularized Composite Allograft (VCA) Committee, the Co-Chair of the American Transplant Congress, and the Chair of the American Society of Transplantation VCA Advisory Council.