Azra Raza is the Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine and Director of the Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) Center at Columbia University.
[1][2] Raza moved to Buffalo, New York, for a residency at Roswell Park, where she researched the biology and pathology of myeloid malignancies.
At Rush, she worked as the Charles Arthur Weaver Professor of Cancer Research, and went on to be the first director of the school's Division of Myeloid Diseases.
[6] Raza has also used genomic technology to further research the pathology of myelodysplastic syndrome, as well as RNA sequence and global methylation studies,[1] and was a part of President Barack Obama's "cancer moonshot" program that reported to Vice-president Joe Biden.
Founded in 1984, it's the oldest repository of its kind created by a single physician and contains 60,000 samples from Raza's patients, including, painfully, her husband's.
Meanwhile, she braids often-harrowing stories of patients, including her own husband, with insights gleaned from laboratory and literature on this complex, often confounding array of diseases.
[25] She also received the Distinguished Services in the Field of Research and Clinical Medicine award from Dow Medical College in 2014.