Dr. Suzanne Ildstad and the multi-disciplinary Institute for Cellular Therapeutics at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky.
Dr. Suzanne Ildstad is Professor of Surgery and Director of the Institute for Cellular Therapeutics at the University of Louisville. She is internationally recognized for having identified a novel cell in bone marrow that makes it possible to safely transplant small amounts of bone marrow from one person to another without life-threatening rejection, even when donor and recipient are only partially matched. In making bone marrow transplants safe, you build a platform to permanently treat or cure autoimmune diseases and genetic blood disorders affecting millions of people worldwide, and allow drug-free tolerance for transplanted organs and tissues. Dr. Ildstad’s research is currently being applied in a number of FDA approved clinical trials at the University of Louisville and collaborating sites, including Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois.
Dr. Ildstad received her medical degree from Mayo Medical School, followed by a residency in general surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. After completing a medical staff fellowship in transplantation immunology at the National Institutes of Heath and a pediatric surgery-transplant fellowship at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Dr. Ildstad joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 1988 in the division of Transplantation Surgery. She and her team were recruited to the University of Louisville in 1998.
Among her many research related national honors, she has received the NIH James A. Shannon Director’s Award for research excellence and the E. Donnall Thomas Lecturer award for research contributions to the field of bone marrow transplantation. The first woman ever to receive a Mayo Clinic Distinguished Alumnus award, she was selected the Mayo Medical School Alumnus of the Decade in 2001.
Dr. Ildstad was elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) at the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 and serves as correspondent for the Committee on Human Rights. She has served on six IOM committees, including those involving organ transplantation policies, multiple sclerosis research strategies and spinal cord injury repair strategies. In 2001, she served as chair of an IOM committee on the challenges of small clinical trials conducted by astronauts in space, a fast-track committee sponsored by NASA in support of the Columbia space mission. In 2006, she additionally served on a committee commissioned by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) on cord blood transplantation.
She has served on the editorial boards of 12 peer-reviewed journals, has more than 160 scientific publications to her credit (135 of which are peer reviewed), has had two books of her own published and co-authored more than 30 chapters in highly respected textbooks. Since 1988, she has served on 35 prestigious national committees and been an invited lecturer at more than 200 national and international medical meetings. Since 1999, fifty-one post-doctoral students from around the world have come to train in her facility.
Link to Dr. Suzanne Ildstad CV
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Dr. Suzanne Ildstad |
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Professor of Surgery, University of Louisville |
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Director, Institute of Cellular Therapeutics |
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Jewish Hospital Distinguished Professor of Transplantation |
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