Laura April Gago, MD

About

Two of the University of Michigan’s fertility programs — fertility preservation and donor oocytes — were built inside the IVF program that Laura April Gago directed. She left that post to open Gago Center for Fertility in Brighton, Michigan in 2007, and her practice explains why: she wanted the freedom to deliver current fertility care alongside complementary wellness programs for couples trying to conceive. She is still the medical director, and she is the physician named in that role on both the clinic’s SART 2023 outcome report and its CDC 2022 registration, so the registry data published for this clinic is filed under her responsibility.

Her training route is a straight line through Michigan medicine. She went to medical school at the University of California at San Diego, came back to Ann Arbor for obstetrics and gynecology residency at the University of Michigan, then did a three-year reproductive endocrinology and infertility fellowship at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she took an assistant clinical professor position before moving to the Michigan IVF directorship. Her practice profile describes her as board-certified in reproductive endocrinology and infertility.

She sees patients at all three offices — Brighton, Lansing and Ann Arbor — and she is the founder of Laura’s Hope, a nonprofit that gives fertility treatment grants to couples who have been through pregnancy loss, neonatal loss or recurrent pregnancy loss. The clinic’s stated treatment principle, in her own framing, is that no two cases are alike: protocols are individualized and revised as reproductive medicine evidence changes.

Clinical Expertise

• IVF cycle management: stimulation design, monitoring, transvaginal retrieval, and culture in the practice’s own laboratory with an on-site embryologist, followed by fresh or frozen transfer decisions based on age and history
• Fertility preservation: she created the University of Michigan program, and at Gago Center she handles egg, embryo and sperm freezing both before cancer treatment and for planned-delay family building
• Donor egg treatment: she built a donor oocyte program in an academic setting and now runs fresh and frozen donor cycles here, matching through donation organizations that follow FDA screening rules
• ICSI and laboratory-side fertilization decisions: single-sperm injection for male factor infertility, frozen sperm and prior fertilization failure
• Preimplantation genetic testing: PGT-A, PGT-M and PGT-SR as part of IVF, with the clinic’s own acknowledgement that testing narrows but does not eliminate genetic risk
• Female infertility evaluation: ovulation disorders including PCOS and premature ovarian failure, tubal and uterine cavity assessment, and hysteroscopic correction of what the workup finds

Why Choose Dr. Gago

She is the clinic’s standard-setter, not one prescriber among many. Gago Center’s outcome data is reported under her name as medical director, and the practice she founded in 2007 carries the two program specialties she built at Michigan — preservation and donor oocytes — into a private-practice setting where the same physician writes the protocol and reviews the result.

Preservation and donor cases are her home turf. Fertility preservation and donor oocyte care are the two areas where she has built programs from nothing, first at a medical school and now in private practice, which matters most for patients on an oncology timeline or working with a donor queue.

Grant money she created herself. Laura’s Hope exists because of her, which means a patient with a loss history can ask about treatment funding in the same visit as the clinical plan.

Small-practice access, small-practice limits. She is one of two reproductive endocrinologists here, so appointments, cycle starts and second opinions inside the practice are constrained. Her SART-reported clinic numbers sit below the national benchmark in every age band, so if your question is which program gives the highest odds per retrieval, ask her to talk through her own data with you — a physician who publishes under her own name is a physician you can hold to those numbers.

Professional Affiliations

Registry roles are the documented affiliations on this profile: Medical Director of record for the clinic’s SART registration (ClinicPKID 2555, SART #0778, a member clinic since 2011) and for its CDC ART clinic profile. Board certification in reproductive endocrinology and infertility is stated on her practice biography page; the sources reviewed here do not document individual memberships in ASRM, SART or any state medical society, so none is claimed on this page. Faculty history: assistant clinical professor at Wayne State University following her fellowship, then Medical Director of In Vitro Fertilization at the University of Michigan. She is also the founder of Laura’s Hope, a nonprofit fertility treatment grant organization.

Suitable For

• IVF patients who want one physician accountable end to end: in a two-endocrinologist practice with an in-house lab, the person who writes your stimulation protocol is the one who reviews your embryos
• Patients facing chemotherapy, radiation or other gonadotoxic treatment: preservation is the program she built first at Michigan and runs here, and timing pressure is the usual constraint
• Diminished ovarian reserve, premature ovarian failure, and donor egg decisions: her donor oocyte program background applies directly, and this clinic’s 2023 registry data on donor cycles is worth asking her to interpret
• Families with a loss history: recurrent pregnancy loss evaluation plus Laura’s Hope grant applications
• Patients who want their predicted odds in writing: the practice generates a free Univfy PreIVF Report from your own test results and reviews it with you before you decide on treatment