𝐀 𝐓𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐃𝐫. 𝐉𝐨𝐡𝐧 𝐑𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐀𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐧 (1954F)

23 December 1935 - 7 April 2026

Dr. John Richard Ackermann’s life was one of those rare medical lives that helped shape a field while it was still being invented. Born on December 23, 1935 in Cape Town, South Africa, and educated at Bishops and the University of Cape Town Medical School, he came into surgery at a moment when organ transplantation was still uncertain, risky, and in many places barely possible. After surgical training, he earned a Wellcome Research Fellowship at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, where he worked on organ preservation and transplantation, and he later worked with Dr. Christiaan Barnard on the earliest heart-transplant efforts. He was not just present near the birth of modern transplantation; he was one of the people doing the hard, technical, unglamorous work that made it real. He published important early research, including the 1966 British Journal of Surgery paper “Successful storage of kidneys,” coauthored with C. N. Barnard, and another 1966 paper, “Live storage of kidneys,” with A. J. Fisher and C. N. Barnard.

When he came to the United States in 1969 with his wife, Liz, and two young daughters, Jean and Lucy, he brought with him not only surgical skill, but deep experience from the front edge of transplant medicine. He accepted a professorship at Vanderbilt University as Professor of Experimental Surgery, where he performed more than 100 kidney transplants. He then moved to Michigan State University, where, as professor of surgery, he established a transplant program and was one of the five kidney transplant surgeons who co-created what became Gift of Life Michigan in 1971. 

Dr. Ackermann’s talent for building did perhaps its most lasting work in Tampa. He moved his family to Tampa in 1972, where he was recruited to start a transplant program. He joined Drs. Dana Shires, Alejandro de Quesada (two of the inventors of Gatorade), and Lawrence Kahana in building the transplant infrastructure in Tampa that later became closely associated with LifeLink. He performed the first successful living kidney transplant in the state of Florida on June 18, 1974. He went on to open what was described at the time as the nation’s only private-practice transplant program. He became known as the “Iron Man,” recovering organs and transplanting kidneys and livers himself, and between 1974 and 1992 he performed more than 1,200 kidney transplants.

What stands out, looking across the arc of his career, is the combination of range and persistence. He worked with pioneers in South Africa and London, carried that experience to Vanderbilt, established a program at Michigan State, helped create a statewide transplant infrastructure in Michigan, and then helped build one of the defining transplant efforts on Florida’s west coast in partnership with Tampa General, the University of South Florida, and LifeLink. He belonged to that generation of surgeons who were not simply practitioners inside a mature specialty; they were builders of the specialty itself. They had to do the research, perform the operations, recruit the teams, persuade institutions, and keep going long enough for something fragile to become durable. 

After stepping away from surgical practice, he continued in academic medicine, teaching at the University of South Florida. A man who spent his life helping create transplant programs also spent his later years helping shape the people who would carry them forward. 

Dr. Ackermann died on April 7, 2026. He is survived by his beloved wife of 65 years, Liz; his daughters, Jean and Lucy; his sons-in-law, Keith and Daniel; and his five grandchildren, Beatrice, Gillian, Grace, Jake, and Amelia. He lived a remarkable life and leaves behind a legacy worthy of deep gratitude, admiration, and respect.

The ODU and Bishops communities send their deepest condolences to Liz, Jean, Lucy and their families.  

Requiescat.

RIP Dr Ackermann!

[The obituary that has been published was received from a contemporary, Paul Cannon (1952S)].