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Krishna Komanduri, MD, Chief of the Division of Hematology and Oncology, UCSF Health

Krishna Komanduri, M.D. holds the Julius R. Krevans Distinguished Professorship and is Physician-in-Chief of the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and Chief of the Division of Hematology and Oncology at UCSF Health. He is also the Clinical Director of the UCSF Living Therapeutics Initiative, a broad campus initiative to develop cellular therapies to treat a broad range of human diseases, including cancers.

Dr. Komanduri received his undergraduate degree in Biology at MIT (Cambridge, MA) and his M.D. from the University of Minnesota Medical School (Minneapolis, MN) before training in internal medicine at UCLA and in hematology and medical oncology at UCSF, where he also pursued research training at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology. He served as a faculty member in hematology and stem cell transplantation at UCSF (1997-99) and the MD Anderson Cancer Center (1999-2008). From 2008 to 2022, he held the Kalish Family Chair in Stem Cell Transplantation at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine where he served as Director of the Stem Cell Transplant and Cellular Therapy program and later as the inaugural Chief of the Division of Transplantation and Cellular Therapy.

Dr. Komanduri has served as the President of the American Society for Transplantation and Cellular Therapy (2017) and has served on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Accreditation of Cellular Therapy. He is a current member of the Board of Directors, Executive Committee (in the position of Secretary) and the Compensation Committee for the National Marrow Donor Program. Since 2016 he has been a member of the MIT NEWDIGS FoCUS (Financing of Curative Therapies in the US) think tank developing finance solutions to curative gene and cell therapies. He has made formal presentations as an expert in the arena of cellular therapy and health care policy to the US FDA, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), The Institute for Clinical and Economoic Review (ICER), to the Medicare RVS Advisory Committee (RUC), to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation and Congressional members and staff.

Dr. Komanduri serves on the United Health/Optum Oncology Care Pathways Advisory Committee and on the Optum Health Blood and Marrow Transplantation Advisory Committee. He is a past Chair of the American Society of Hematology Scientific Committee on Host Defense, is the current Chair of the ASTCT Cellular Therapy Committee and also Chair of the ASTCT Government Relations Committee. He has served on a broad range of NIH and private foundation study sections, including as a Permanent Member (from 2010-15) of the NIH Transplantation, Tolerance and Tumor Immunology Study Section.

Among his honors, he was elected into the American Society for Clinical Investigation (2009), and was recently inducted in to the Henry Kunkel Society (2021) and into the second class to be named Fellow of the American Society for Transplantation and Cellular Therapy (2021).