Robert Ward O'Rourke, MD

Dr. O'Rourke serves as Professor in the Division of Minimally Invasive Surgery at Michigan Medicine, and as Chief of the Division of General Surgery and Director of the Bariatric Surgery Program at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA in 1986 with degrees in Chemical Engineering and Molecular Biology, obtained his MD in 1993 from the UCLA Medical School in Los Angeles, CA, and completed his general surgery residency training in 2001 at UCSF in San Francisco, CA. He completed an Advanced Minimally Invasive Surgery Fellowship in 2003 at Legacy Health Systems in Portland, OR. Dr. O'Rourke joined the faculty at the University of Michigan Health System in 2013. He practices clinical general, minimally invasive , and bariatric surgery at the Ann Arbor VA Hospital. Dr. O'Rourke manages an NIH-funded research program that studies molecular and cellular mechanisms of adipose tissue dysfunction in the context of metabolic disease. He is active in resident and medical student education and serves as an active member of multiple national surgical societies and on the editorial boards of the journals Obesity Surgery and SOARD.

Bariatric surgery
Minimally Invasive General Surgery

University of Michigan Health participates with most health insurance plans.

Molecular and cellular mechanisms of adipose tissue dysfunction in the context of diabetes

Extracellular matrix-adipocyte metabolic crosstalk

Adipocyte-cancer crosstalk