Sam Cornell

Work

Ongoing

Three Systems, One Mission

A comparative study of how three countries run organ donation and transplantation. In September 2026 I visited Poland’s national transplant agency, Poltransplant, in Warsaw and the Ukrainian Transplant Coordination Center in Kyiv, and compared both with the American system I work in, at a moment when U.S. organ procurement organizations are being recertified under new federal metrics. The central finding so far: what separates the three systems is donor identification and organ yield per donor, not surgical capacity. Volume 1 is published here. Volume 2 will follow the next round of interviews.

How it was built. Two site visits (Poltransplant in Warsaw, Sept. 15, 2026; the UTCC in Kyiv, Sept. 17, 2026), national registry and ministry statistics for Poland and Ukraine, and published U.S. national data. I built the cross-country comparison tables and figures myself in Python, and every claim in the report is labeled by the strength of its evidence.

The Florida ALPR Transparency Project

An ongoing, records-based research project on how Florida counties procure, govern, and oversee automated license plate readers and related surveillance cameras, built from public records, vendor documents, and Florida statutes. I have presented findings to the Alachua County Commission, and the goal is constructive: clear rules, informed residents, and decisions about this technology made in public. Volume III (Alachua County, November 2026) covers what changed after the state ordered the cameras off state roads; Volume II covers Putnam and Alachua counties as of July 2026.

How it was built. Florida public-records requests to the Sheriff’s Office, the County and the City of Gainesville; the Sheriff’s camera deployment tracker and device-health exports analyzed as spreadsheets; county right-of-way permits pulled from Citizenserve; and Florida’s plate-reader statutes and public-records law for the legal framework. Each finding is labeled Documented, Inference or Open question.

MBA, IT Management

Western Governors University, expected January 2027. Pursued in the margins of full-time surgical work, which is its own course in time management.

Flight training

Working toward a private pilot certificate. Flying taught me checklists, weather respect, and the value of a three-second breath, and it keeps teaching both.

Languages

Spanish (fluent), Italian (intermediate), Mandarin (beginner, actively studying). Language is access; every new one changes what the world will tell you.

This site

One essay a month, kept honestly, for a long time. The longest-horizon project on the page.

Built & continuing

Research

Scientific research permanently changed how I evaluate evidence.

Pending co-authored abstract with the American College of Surgeons (#5345) on lateral extraperitoneal positioning of the renal allograft vein in human kidney transplantation.

SCOPE

An eCommerce and contracting business I founded and operate remotely, built and scaled while I worked surgical call and finished an MBA. It runs on automation, analytics, and AI-assisted workflows, and on the conviction, formed the hard way, that your ability to practice your craft shouldn’t depend on someone else’s letterhead.

Trauma kits in every school in Alachua County

At eighteen, after the Parkland shooting, I researched trauma survivability data, consulted emergency physicians and sheriffs across multiple counties, and presented the case to the Alachua County School Board. The board approved trauma kits for every public school facility in the county. It was my first real lesson in how evidence becomes policy: someone has to do the unglamorous translation work.

Federal advocacy on organ procurement policy

Traveled to Washington, D.C. to brief U.S. Senate and Congressional offices on a CMS final rule governing organ procurement organization performance metrics, translating regulatory language into plain terms for policymakers. A one-day schedule became two.