Dr. Sarah Tasian Appointed Chief of the Section of Hematologic Malignancies

Sarah Tasian, MD The Division of Oncology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) has appointed Sarah Tasian, MD, as Chief of the Section of Hematologic Malignancies, effective July 1, 2021. Dr. Tasian will succeed Richard Aplenc, MD, PhD, MSCE, who filled this role with distinction for 13 years. In her new role, Dr. Tasian will oversee a dynamic group of faculty, instructors, nurse practitioners, nurses, social workers, and clinical and laboratory research staff within the Cancer Center at CHOP, which was recently recognized by U.S. News & World Report as the #1 pediatric oncology program in the nation for the second year in a row.

“I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Tasian as the new Chief of the Section of Hematologic Malignancies,” said Stephen Hunger, MD, Chief of the Division of Oncology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “She is uniquely suited for this new role, and, as a current CHOP faculty member, has established herself as a world leader in basic, translational and clinical research in leukemia, with a focus on developing new precision medicine therapies and immunotherapies for high risk and relapsed acute leukemias. She holds multiple NIH grants, is an outstanding teacher and educator and a consummate physician. I look forward to working closely with her in this new role.”

A pediatric oncologist and physician-scientist at CHOP and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Dr. Tasian’s primary area of interest is the development of molecularly targeted therapeutics for children with high-risk leukemias. She earned both Bachelor of Sciences (Biological Sciences) and Bachelor of Arts (Psychology) degrees summa cum laude at the University of Notre Dame with election to the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society, and she earned her medical degree at Baylor College of Medicine with election to the Alpha Omega Alpha academic medical honor society. Dr. Tasian was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute-National Institutes of Health (HHMI-NIH) Research Scholar during medical school and  trained in Pediatrics at Seattle Children’s Hospital/University of Washington and in pediatric hematology-oncology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Dr. Tasian specializes in the clinical care of children with hematologic malignancies and is an internationally recognized expert in pediatric ALL and AML, as well as a dedicated mentor of trainees. Her bench-to-bedside and bedside-back-to-bench translational laboratory research program focuses upon testing of kinase inhibitors and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell immunotherapies in high-risk genetic subsets of childhood ALL and AML.

Dr. Tasian has received several teaching awards and holds multiple leadership roles in the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) ALL and Myeloid Diseases committees and Leukemia Lymphoma Society PedAL/EuPAL consortium. Dr. Tasian is also the COG Developmental Therapeutics committee Vice-Chair of Biology for Hematologic Malignancies, and she further leads or co-leads several national or international early phase clinical trials testing precision medicine therapies in children with high-risk leukemias.

Dr. Tasian is a member of the American Society of Hematology, Children’s Oncology Group, American Society of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology, American Association for Cancer Research, American Society of Clinical Oncology, International Society of Paediatric Oncology, International BFM Study Group, and European Hematology Association. She serves on the medical advisory boards of several childhood cancer funding organizations and as a peer reviewer for multiple biomedical journals. She has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications.