Dr. Charles F. Zukoski III papers

Dr. Zukoski was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Harvard Medical School and completed an internship at Roosevelt Hospital. He served as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force and completed residency training at University Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a fellow at the Medical College of Virginia.

Dr. Zukoski joined the UA Department of Surgery in 1969, only a few months after the official activation of the department in the two-year-old College of Medicine. Previously an associate professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and University of North Carolina, he was appointed professor of surgery at the UA to develop the Section of General Surgery.

He served as chief of General Surgery at the UA, and chief of Surgical Service and the Section of Renal Transplantation at the Veterans Administration Hospital, where he performed Tucson's first kidney transplant in 1970.

He was instrumental in increasing awareness of the need for more organ donors during the 1980s and, along with heart transplant surgeon Dr. Jack Copeland, co-authored a law adopted by the Arizona Legislature in 1986, which requires hospitals to ask families to consider donating the organs and tissue of deceased patients. The law was, among other things, credited for increasing the number of donor eyes available for corneal transplants.

Dr. Zukoski is best known for his pioneering work in immuno-suppression therapies. During his career at the UA, he took sabbatical leave twice to conduct immunology research. He spent October 1976-September 1977 in the Department of Immunology, John Curtin School of Medical Research at Australian National University in Canberra Australia, and in October 1987-May 1988, he performed

research at the Sammelweis University Medical School in Budapest, Hungary.

In 1976, he received a Macy Foundation Faculty Scholarship to research immune systems of the body and organ transplant rejection at the Australian National University in Canberra.

He retired from the department in 1995. He sponsored an award given every year at the General Surgery Residency Graduation for Outstanding Role Model in Surgery.

Bio authored by: Rainer Gruessner, MD, FACS | Professor and Chairman | Department of Surgery | University of Arizona