Robert W. O'Rourke

Dr. O'Rourke serves as Professor in the Division of Minimally Invasive Surgery at Michigan Medicine and the Ann Arbor Veterans Healthcare System, and as Chief of the Division of General Surgery and Director of the Bariatric Surgery Program at the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Healthcare System. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA in 1986 with degrees in Chemical Engineering and Molecular Biology, obtained his MD in 1993 from the UCLA Medical School in Los Angeles, CA, and completed his general surgery residency training in 2001 at UCSF in San Francisco, CA. He completed an Advanced Minimally Invasive Surgery Fellowship in 2003 at Legacy Health Systems in Portland, OR. Dr. O'Rourke joined the faculty at the University of Michigan Health System in 2013, after ten years as a faculty member in the Department of Surgery at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, OR. He has spent the last 6 years practicing clinical general and bariatric surgery at the Ann Arbor VA Hospital. Dr. O'Rourke has managed an NIH-funded research program for the past 16 years that studies molecular and cellular mechanisms of adipose tissue dysfunction in the context of metabolic disease.