Dr. D. Montgomery Bissell is Professor of Medicine and Director Emeritus of the UCSF Liver Center, an NIH-funded consortium of 40 independently funded researchers who study the liver and its diseases. Bissell has a career-long interest in liver disease, dating to when he conducted a project on hepatocellular carcinoma in East Africa as a Harvard medical student. He then turned his attention to defining the cellular responses and molecular regulation of the scarring process known as fibrosis and cirrhosis. The latter is the most important consequence of many chronic liver diseases including inborn errors of metabolism, viral hepatitis, autoimmune states, alcohol abuse and others. It also is the setting for most cases of liver cancer.

Since 1981, Bissell has led the Rice-Liver Center Laboratory at San Francisco General Hospital, known internationally for basic research on fibrosis and defining new therapies to block fibrosis progression in patients. He is a member of several professional organizations including the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians and has served on numerous review panels for NIH, the Veterans Administration and other groups.