New Leadership Elected to American Society of Hematology
(WASHINGTON, October 25, 2018) – The American Society of Hematology (ASH), the world’s largest professional society concerned with the causes and treatment of blood disorders, today announced the election of four new members to its Executive Committee for terms beginning after the 2018 ASH Annual Meeting, December 1-4 in San Diego.
Martin S. Tallman, MD, will serve a one-year term as vice president followed by successive terms as president-elect and president. Mark Crowther, MD, will serve a four-year term as treasurer. Belinda R. Avalos, MD, and Arnold Ganser, MD, will each serve four-year terms as councillors.
“Drs. Tallman, Crowther, Avalos, and Ganser have been dedicated leaders within ASH through their work on various committees. I want to congratulate them on the results of the election, and I look forward to their contributions to the path forward for ASH and its membership,” said 2018 ASH President Alexis A. Thompson, MD, MPH, of the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “Their commitment to leadership will be particularly important for ASH and the field of hematology, which are at the forefront of cutting-edge approaches to treating and curing cancer and other serious blood diseases.”
Dr. Tallman is the chief of the leukemia service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. His research interests include clinical investigation in acute myeloid leukemia, acute lymphocytic leukemia, acute promyelocytic leukemia, and hairy cell leukemia.
Dr. Tallman has been a member of ASH for 20 years, and during that time he has served in various leadership roles representing the Society, most recently serving as an ASH councillor. He is currently completing a three-year term as the executive editor of Hematology, the Society’s education program book, and he helped establish and co-chair the ASH Meeting on Hematologic Malignancies in 2015 and continued to serve as co-chair in 2016. He has also participated in several of ASH’s training and educational career development programs.
“The most important issue facing hematology today is the remarkably rapid pace of progress in the discovery, dissemination, and integration of new knowledge,” said Dr. Tallman. “I believe that my past leadership activities in ASH will enable me to effectively contribute to the strategic decision of the Executive Committee and further ASH’s mission to promote research, clinical care, education, training, and advocacy in hematology.”
Dr. Crowther, the treasurer-elect, is the chair of the department of medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His research interests include improving the quality of anticoagulant care through derivation of evidence-based strategies for anticoagulant management and management of complications of anticoagulation, and management of patients with high-risk thrombophilias, focusing on antiphospholipid antibody syndrome. Dr. Crowther has been a member of ASH for 24 years. He is currently serving as the co-chair of the ASH Education Program for the 2018 ASH Annual Meeting. He previously served as the chair of the ASH Committee on Quality and as a member of the venous thromboembolism guideline coordination panel.
Dr. Avalos, councillor-elect, is the vice chair of the department of hematologic oncology and blood disorders at the Levine Cancer Institute and a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Her research interests include hematopoiesis and mechanisms of leukemogenesis, congenital neutropenias, receptors and cell signaling, and allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation. She has been a member of ASH for 25 years and has served as the chair of ASH’s Committee on Promoting Diversity and as chair of The Hematologist Editor Search Committee.
Dr. Ganser is a professor of hematology and oncology and director of the department of hematology, hemostasis, oncology, and stem cell transplantation at Hannover Medical School in Germany. His research interests include translational research on hematopoiesis and leukemogenesis, and clinical research on acute myeloid leukemia, myelodysplastic syndromes, bone marrow failure states, and stem cell transplantation. Dr. Ganser has been a member of ASH for 29 years. He has served as chair of the ASH International Members Committee and is the current co-chair of ASH’s International Consortium on Acute Leukemias.
The American Society of Hematology (ASH) (www.hematology.org) is the world’s largest professional society of hematologists dedicated to furthering the understanding, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disorders affecting the blood. For more than 50 years, the Society has led the development of hematology as a discipline by promoting research, patient care, education, training, and advocacy in hematology. ASH publishes Blood (www.bloodjournal.org), the most cited peer-reviewed publication in the field, which is available weekly in print and online. In 2016, ASH launched Blood Advances (www.bloodadvances.org), an online, peer-reviewed open-access journal.
CONTACT:
Sara Khalaf, American Society of Hematology
skhalaf@hematology.org; 202-552-4925