Asociate Professor, Oncology and Pediatrics

Clinical Director, Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplantation 

I am the Clinical Director of Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplantation and have been involved in clinical bone marrow transplantation research for over 18 years. I obtained my Masters in Clinical Investigation in 2010 from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and am a prior K23 recipient. My research focus has been utilizing haploidentical (half-matched”) donors for a variety of malignant and nonmalignant disorders. Every patient in need of a bone marrow transplant should have an available donor with a regimen that is safe and efficacious. Improving the efficacy and availability of allogeneic BMT using haploidentical donors while decreasing its toxicity is a long term goal. As the principal investigator, I completed the first national, multi-institutional trial using myeloablative HLA- haploidentical BMT (haploBMT) with post-transplantation cyclophosphamide for pediatric hematologic malignancies through the Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Consortium (PBMTC).  I am also the principal investigator of an Institutional trial of reduced intensity conditioning haploBMT for high risk solid tumors (P01 funded) and a reduced intensity conditioning haploBMT for immunodeficiences, immune dysregulatory syndromes and inherited bone marrow failure syndromes. I am a co-investigator on several other institutional and national BMTCTN trials utilizing haploBMT for malignant and non-malignant disorders. I am on the steering Committee of the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) stem cell committee and am the PI of a phase 3 trial randomizing pediatric patients with acute leukemia to haploBMT versus matched unrelated donor BMT. I currently sit on the Johns Hopkins IRB as well as the Data Trust and the Safety Monitoring Committee. I have early career laboratory experience studying the effects of the endogenous immune system on metastatic mouse models of cancer and continue to collaborate with my laboratory mentors in designing and running correlative laboratory studies for clinical trials.