The Department of General Surgery's extensive research initiatives are both laboratory- and clinically-based, providing research training opportunities to a large number of students and fellows. The Department is home to the Laboratory for Transplantation and Tissue Engineering and the Laboratory for Lung Growth.

The focus of the Laboratory for Transplantation and Tissue Engineering's research is the design of new tissues that are created in the laboratory using functional cells plus biodegradable polymer scaffolds appropriately configured.

The focus of the Laboratory for Lung Growth has been to tap the processes responsible for lung development in healthy fetuses and newborn infants to treat children who are born with underdeveloped lungs due to conditions such as congenital diaphragmatic hernia. The laboratory has been successful in stimulating normal lung growth and has begun to investigate the mechanisms responsible for this growth. Clinical trials have begun in humans to evaluate the usefulness of some of the techniques developed in the laboratory.

Featured researchers in the Department of General Surgery hold faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School.