Hiroshi Date, MD is a Chairman and Professor, Department of Thoracic Surgery, Kyoto University, Japan. After graduating from Okayama University School of Medicine in 1984, he was trained by Drs Joel D Cooper and G Alexander Patterson at Washington University as a research (1989-91) and a clinical lung transplant fellow (1994-5). He also spent a year (1993-4) as a general thoracic fellow at The Cleveland Clinic Foundation. In 1998, he performed the first successful living-donor lobar lung transplantation in Japan. Since then, he has performed more than 300 lung transplants resulting in about 70% survival rate at 10-years. Dr. Date has performed more than 4,000 thoracotomies and has authored more than 600 peer-reviewed publications in various fields of general thoracic surgery including thoracic malignancy and lung transplantation.