AZRA RAZA, M.D. is the Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York and the director of the MDS center.
Dr. Raza completed her medical education in Pakistan; training in internal medicine at the University of Maryland, Franklin Square Hospital, and Georgetown/VA Medical Center in Washington, D.C.; and her fellowship in Medical Oncology at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. She started her research in Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS) in 1982, moved briefly to Cincinnati, Ohio and then to Chicago, Illinois in 1992, where she established a highly productive translational research program in MDS. This program, along with a tissue repository containing more than 40,000 samples from MDS patients was successfully relocated to the University of Massachusetts in 2004 and to St. Vincent’s Comprehensive Cancer Center (SVCCC) in 2007. Before moving to SVCCC, Dr. Raza was the Chief of Hematology at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester.
Dr. Raza belongs to that rare group of unique investigators who are adept at both basic and clinical research. Her basic research has been strictly therapy-driven and is marked by Dr. Raza's tireless efforts to move the advances in the laboratory to the bedside with alacrity for the improvement of treatment outcome of MDS patients. Dr. Raza is well known internationally for several landmark observations related to the biology and treatment of MDS. She has published the results of her laboratory research and a large number of clinical trials in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals, such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Blood, Cancer, Cancer Research, British Journal of Hematology, Leukemia, Leukemia Research (250 full-length papers, 15 book chapters, 510 abstracts, and editor of a book devoted to MDS).
She is the author of The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last.
