Kutluk Oktay, MD, PhD

Kutluk Oktay MD, Ph.D. is a clinician-scientist, the world’s leading expert in fertility preservation, and a renowned ovarian biologist. He balances his time between his research laboratory which studies mechanisms of ovarian aging and chemotherapy-induced damage to ovarian reserve as well as those regulating maintenance of ovarian reserve in the human ovary, and his clinical practice and trials on fertility preservation and infertility. He developed and performed the world’s first ovarian transplant procedure with cryopreserved tissue and pioneered innovative ovarian stimulation protocols for cancer patients. In addition, he described the first oocyte freezing protocols in young pubertal girls with Turner syndrome and other medical conditions. Dr. Oktay developed a new ovarian transplantation technique utilizing a human extracellular matrix scaffold and robotic surgery, which further improved the outcomes of ovarian transplantation. He is the founder and first chair of the highly successful Fertility Preservation Special Interest Group at the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, which awarded him the Distinguished Service Award in 2022. He has been the co-chair of the American Society of Clinical Oncology Guidelines of Committee since 2005, which shaped the practice of fertility preservation for nearly two decades.

As a basic scientist, Dr. Oktay has been conducting key basic research on ovarian follicle development and aging. He discovered the role of BRCA function and DNA repair in ovarian and oocyte aging. As a result, Dr. Oktay was the first to discover that women who carry the BRCA mutations have accelerated ovarian aging.

As an ovarian biologist and a translational researcher, he has been continuously funded by the NIH and other sources over the past 18 years and received numerous national and international awards from professional societies and patient organizations for his contributions. He has been repetitively named among the country's top doctors in his field by Castle and Connolly and other organizations. He has published over 200 manuscripts, including those in leading medical journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Science Translational Medicine, JAMA, JAMA Oncology, and Journal of Clinical Oncology. He published over 40 book chapters and is the editor of the first textbook on ovarian cryopreservation and transplantation published in 2022.

He is a sought-after educator and lectures around the world on clinical, translational, and basic science topics in ovarian biology, aging, fertility preservation, assisted reproduction, genome editing, and others.