Dr. Reese has leveraged empirical evidence and cogent ethical arguments to improve the process for selecting and caring for living kidney donors. He was one of the first to draw attention to the trend of accepting kidney donors with plausible risks for kidney disease such as hypertension (American Journal of Transplantation) and the wide variation in centers in accepting these donors. He showed that older living kidney donors (>55 years) – the fastest growing demographic group among living organ donors – have similar survival and other health outcomes compared to healthy non-donors (American Journal of Transplantation). He also examined living kidney donors who later developed end-stage renal disease and were themselves wait-listed for kidney transplant. Because of favorable allocation policy, these former donors experienced brief waiting times, were transplanted with high quality kidneys, and had post-transplant outcomes that are similar to kidney transplant recipients matched on multiple relevant attributes (Journal of the American Society of Nephrology).

Dr. Reese has also advanced some of the highest quality evidence related to compensation for living kidney donation. With Scott Halpern and colleagues, he examined the likely effects of financial incentives for living kidney donation on potential donors across income strata. The analysis showed little evidence that incentives would lead to ethical problems such as undue inducement (Annals of Internal Medicine). 

Dr. Reese has also called for sensible approaches to engaging and obtaining informed consent from living donors, who often make the donation decision because of strong relationships and in some cases, relational autonomy (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24730047/). His research has provided strong conceptual support and preliminary empirical evidence for the idea that turning down some individuals as organ donors can lead to non-physical harms (PMID: 30218994).