Also called: Organ Care System Specialist, Organ Preservation Specialist
Keeps a donated heart, lung or liver warm and supplied with blood inside a machine while it travels to the patient who needs it.
Gets paged at night, flies with the surgical team to a donor hospital and helps place a donated heart into a portable device that keeps it beating. During the flight you watch the screens and adjust pressures and fluids, then hand it off in the recipient's operating room hours later. Ice coolers gave hearts only about four hours.
Estimate.
Approximate: anchored on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for a broader job group.
Master's degree, about 6.5 years after high school. Usually a certified perfusionist, nurse or surgical professional, then device-company training.
Ways in: Graduate school, Certification, On-the-job training. Training cost: $60k – $150k.
Majors to look at: Perfusion Science, Biology, Nursing.
Growing much faster than average. Machine organ perfusion is spreading fast at transplant centers.
Low risk for 10 years. Running organ machines during flights and surgeries is hands-on, high-stakes work.
Classes: Biology, Chemistry, Physics.
Career Universe is an early version. Pay, training and AI-risk figures are estimates to start your own research, not verified facts. The research was written with AI research assistants, checked by validation scripts and spot-checked by hand. Check anything important with schools, employers and official sources. How the numbers work.