After serving for two years in the
United States Navy as a staff surgeon at Walter Reed Medical Center, an assistant professor of surgery at the
Uniformed Services University School of Medicine, and as ship's surgeon on the
USS Independence, Delmonico was recruited to the
Massachusetts General Hospital in 1980 as a member of the transplantation unit of the department of surgery. He was promoted to visiting surgeon in 1997 and to professor of surgery at the
Harvard Medical School in 2000. From 1990 until 2004 he was the director of the Renal Transplantation Service at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Throughout his time at Mass General, he has devoted much of his research efforts to clinical investigation. In the early part of his career, he focused upon the management of recipient immunosuppression and more recently upon the clinical parameters that define the suitable organ donor. In 1995, Delmonico was appointed medical director of the New England Organ Bank, now New England Donor Services. This study removed a heretofore absolute contraindication to organ donation, thereby expanding the organ donor pool for selected allograft recipients. Another focus of Delmonico's organ donor interest has been the concept of death. He has been responsible for the development of the Donation after Cardiac Death initiative in transplant centers within the NEDS service area. He was awarded a
Department of Health and Human Services Grant as the
principal investigator of a project to study the acceptance of kidneys recovered from deceased
expanded criteria donors and has served as the medical advisor to the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations. Delmonico has served on the board of trustees and numerous committees of the
United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) and as its President., and on the lung, liver, intestine and pancreas donor in Vancouver, Canada, in September 2005, with participation of over 100 physicians and surgeons from 44 countries around the world. Furthermore, he served as TTS's director of medical affairs from 2006 to 2010 and president from 2012 to 2014. In 2020, he received the Society's highest distinction in being awarded the Medawar Prize for his lifetime contribution to the field of transplantation. He works closely with the
World Health Organization who made him a WHO consultant on matter of human organ donation and transplantation. In 2008, he was responsible for convening the Istanbul Summit from which the
Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism was derived. He became executive director the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group in 2015. ==Writings==