Dr. Ladner is an Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Division of Organ Transplantation. After a two year postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University, Dr. Ladner completed her general surgery residency and multi-organ transplant surgery fellowship at Stanford University Medical Center. She received her Masters in Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2008.

Dr. Ladner is clinically involved in kidney and liver transplantation surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and at Children's Memorial Hospital. In addition, she leads the Northwestern University Transplant Outcomes Collaborative (NUTORC). NUTORC is a collaboration between experts from different schools (School of Engineering, Kellogg School of Management), departments (Medical Social Sciences, Surgery) and institutes (Institute for Healthcare Studies, Enterprise Data Warehouse) at Northwestern focusing on transplant related outcomes research.

As the Director of NUTORC she oversees seven workgroups (think tanks): safety, quality of life, disparity, access and allocation, risks and econometrics, and health literacy, health informatics. Dr. Ladner has received intramural and extramural funding particularly for her safety research in kidney and liver transplantation.