Wojciech Polak graduated in medicine cum laude at the Medical University in Wroclaw (Poland) in 1992. Between 1992 and 1993 he finished his internship in Klinikum Innestadt in Munich, Germany. In 2000 he finished his residency in general surgery at the Department of Vascular, General and Transplantation Surgery at the University Hospital in Wroclaw, where he was appointed afterwards as a consultant surgeon. Between 2001 and 2003 he completed surgical fellowship in hepatobiliary surgery and liver transplantation at the Department of Surgery at the University Medical Center in Groningen, the Netherlands. In 2006 he was appointed as a consultant surgeon in hepatobiliary and transplant surgery at the Department of Surgery at the University Medical Center in Groningen. Since 2007 he is certified transplant surgeon at the European Board of Surgeons. In 2008 he defended his PhD thesis entitled “Technical aspects of liver transplantation” at the University of Groningen. The same year he was appointed as Associated Professor at the Medical University in Wroclaw. Since September 2009 Dr. Wojciech Polak is currently appointed as a consultant transplant and hepatobiliary surgeon at the Department of Surgery at the Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where he is Surgical Director of Liver Transplant Program.

Between 2007 and 2018 Dr. Wojciech Polak was actively working in the Education Committee of the ESOT, where he served as the Vice-Chair. Between 2019 and 2021 he was a Chair of European Liver and Intestine Transplant Association (ELITA), where he currently served as a Past Chair. In 2015 he was awarded with Honorary Diploma of European Board of Surgery (UEMS) in Hepatopancreatobiliary Surgery. Dr. Polak is also the Chair of the Education Committee of the European-African Hepatopancreatobiliary Association. His clinical and scientific area of expertise is liver transplantation and  hepatobiliary surgery.