In 1995, Prof. Dr Barış Akin graduated from Ankara University Faculty of Medicine and received the ECFMG certificate, which entitles him to practice medicine in the USA. In 2000, Prof Dr Akin graduated from Ankara University Faculty of Medicine, General Surgery Programme and became a specialist in General Surgery. He completed his upper residency in organ transplant surgery at Ohio State University in 2004. He received the certificate of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons and continued to work as an organ transplant surgeon in the USA.

Prof. Dr. Barış Akin performed 250 kidney transplants and 280 laparoscopic kidney removals in the USA during this period. In 2004, he received the Young Investigator Award at the American Transplant Congress. In 2004, he returned to Turkey and started working as the Director of the Kidney Transplant Centre at Florence Nightingale Group Hospitals and he is still working in this position. During this period, he has performed kidney transplantation for more than 1500 patients. He has achieved the results of the world’s most successful centres in his own centre and has helped train dozens of transplant doctors and coordinators from Turkey and abroad.

Thanks to the “endoscopic hand-assisted retroperitoneoscopy” technique developed by Prof Dr Barış Akin in 2009, a safer camera surgery technique has been proposed for people who will donate kidneys to their relatives. He has performed over 1300 cases using this technique. He is also one of the first practitioners of the “Robotic Retroperitonoscopic Surgery Technique” in the world.

As a result of his surgical experience, he has trained numerous surgeons at his centre and has participated as an instructor in national and international courses on kidney transplantation. The most important of these are the European Transplant Association’s live kidney donation training course, which he has been supporting since 2016, and the International Transplant Network organisation’s training courses, which he has chaired four times. He has published more than forty articles in international journals. He has worked for the initiation and development of kidney transplant programmes in many different countries, such as the University of Baku in Azerbaijan.

Prof Dr Baris Akin also has important responsibilities abroad. He is the President of the Kidney Board of the European Society of Transplantation (ESOT) and the representative of the European Union of Transplant Surgery (UEMS) in Turkey.