Dr. Valapour completed her training in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine as well as Bioethics and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University. She currently holds joint appointments in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Valapour's clinical practice is focused on the evaluation of lung transplant candidates and the care of lung transplant recipients. Her research interests center around questions of health policy and ethics as they relate to organ transplantation. Her latest projects include: 1) Identifying policy barriers that have prevented living donor lung transplantation from becoming widely available by comparing it to the more widely practiced enterprise of living donor kidney transplantation. 2) Studying the quality of informed consent for living kidney and lung donors. 3) Working on the moral analysis and ethical framework of defining fair and efficient organ allocation systems.