Soiffer Installed as President;
Anasetti Elected Vice President

Robert Soiffer, MD, chief of the Division of Hematologic Malignancies at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, has been installed as president of the American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation. 

Claudio Anasetti, MD, professor of oncology and medicine at the University of South Florida, and program leader of the Blood and Marrow Transplant Program at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, Tampa, is the newly elected and installed vice president, to become president in 2009.

The installation of new officers and directors occurred at the society’s annual meeting, the BMT Tandem Meetings, on Feb. 10 in Keystone, Colo.  The election was by mail ballot among members of the society in December and January.

Newly elected and installed directors are:

·         Jeffrey Rodney Schriber, MD, of the City of Hope/Samaritan Bone Marrow Transplantation Program in Phoenix

·         Paul J. Martin, MD, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington in Seattle

·         Ginna G. Laport, MD, of  the Division of Bone Marrow Transplantation at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif.

Helen Heslop, MD, was elevated to president-elect and will assume the presidency in 2008.  She is professor of medicine and of pediatrics and director of adult stem cell transplantation at the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston.

The new ASBMT president, Dr. Soiffer, is co-director of Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation at Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  He also is the chair of the Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee at Dana-Farber.

Dr. Soiffer is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., and earned his medical degree at New York University School of Medicine.  He was an intern, resident and chief medical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  He was a medical oncology fellow at Dana-Farber.

He is a member of the executive steering committee of the Bone Marrow Transplant Clinical Trials Network (BMT CTN), and a member of three of the network’s committees:  toxicity, acute myeloid leukemia, and graft-versus-host disease.  He is a member of the Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia Committee of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN).

Dr. Soiffer has been a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Immunology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research and Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation.