Michael R. Harrison MD

Dr. Michael Harrison is director emeritus and co-founder of the Fetal Treatment Center at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. He is an internationally known expert in fetal surgery, an area he helped pioneer with his colleagues at UCSF. For more than 25 years, he has studied how life-threatening fetal abnormalities alter normal physical processes. He developed techniques for both open surgery and minimally invasive surgery to repair many birth defects. Harrison's team also developed in utero stem cell transplantation to treat immune system deficiencies, enzyme deficiencies and abnormal hemoglobin in the blood.

Harrison graduated cum laude from Yale University and magna cum laude from Harvard Medical School. He completed surgical training at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a pediatric surgery fellowship at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. He is a professor emeritus of surgery, pediatrics, obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences.