Dr. Erasmus is a University of Pretoria alumnus, where he completed his medical school education, and then pursued specialty and subspecialty training at St. Louis University, USA. In 2006, he joined the newly established lung transplant program at Mayo Clinic in Florida, where he served as medical director of the lung transplant program from 2016 – 2022.

During that time, he also served as the chair of the Mayo Clinic’s 3-site committee for lung transplant on the Florida, Rochester, and Arizona campuses.  He moved to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2022, where he serves as an Associate Professor and the medical director of the lung transplant program. He is the regional representative for OPTN (Organ Procurement and Transplant Network) and serves on the OPTN committee, which oversees new policy changes for transplantation in the USA. He has an interest in optimising outcomes after lung transplant and has published novel therapies for chronic rejection, including the use of mesenchymal stem cells for chronic lung allograft dysfunction and the assessment of outcomes with different induction agents. Rapid growth in lung transplant places a burden on internal support systems.  He has a particular interest in optimising outcomes despite growth in volume after lung transplantation.

Vanderbilt currently ranks among the top 3 in the USA in terms of the volume of lung transplants performed and is in the top 2 in terms of outcomes and survival according to the Scientific Registry for Transplant Recipients (SRTR).