Dana L. Sacco, MD

Monica Velasco is certified by the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners as a Family Nurse Practitioner. She received her Doctorate in Nursing Practice from Columbia University School of Nursing in New York, NY. Previously, she received her Master of Science in Nursing and her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Miami, FL. She is a member of Sigma Theta Tau International Nursing Honor Society and the Transplant Nurses Association. She earned many awards and honors during her clinical and academic career, including the Mary Dickey Lindsay '45 Nursing Scholar, 2013 from Columbia University School of Nursing. She has co-authored numerous transplant publications and has served as an international guest speaker. She is considered an expert in the field of Intestinal and Multivisceral Transplant.Monica's nursing experience spans over 25 years. She began her transplant career in 1998 at the University of Miami, where she worked for 13 years as the Program Manager for the Pediatric Liver and Intestinal Transplant Division and Senior Transplant Clinical Coordinator. During her time there, she helped grow the Liver and Intestinal Transplant Program into one of the top transplant centers in the world. In 2010, she was recruited by the Center of Liver Disease and Abdominal Transplantation at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. Currently, she is the Program Manager for the Intestinal and Ex-Vivo Transplant Division and is a Senior Transplant Clinical Coordinator. She has over two decades of clinical experience in pediatrics, taking care of complex liver and intestinal transplant patients. She has vast experience working with nutritionally challenged patients who require enteral and parenteral nutrition. She is a co-investigator on numerous research projects in the areas of liver and intestinal transplantation.She holds a Clinical Faculty Position at Columbia University School of Nursing, where she serves as an Assistant Professor of Nursing, Clinical Preceptor and Portfolio Advisor for their Doctorate Program.Fluent in SpanishVisit The Center for Liver Disease and Transplantation at columbiasurgery.org/liver

Arnold Han, MD, PhD, is trained as a clinical gastroenterologist and a basic scientist with expertise in immunology. He is applying his very unique training as both a basic scientist trained in immunology and a clinician trained in Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology to pursue clinically important scientific questions in tumor immunity and autoimmunity.

Dr. Diaz is an assistant professor of Neurology at CUIMC, in the division of Neuro-Oncology. She is originally from Madrid, Spain, where she graduated medical school at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She then moved to the US to continue her medical education, completing an internal medicine internship followed by neurology residency at University of Virginia. She then pursued a 3-year Neuro-oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, after which she joined NYP/CUIMC. Her research interests include tumor markers in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) as well as clinical trials.