Jay Feinberg (born August 1968 in New York City) is a long-term leukemia survivor, community organizer and founder and current CEO of the Gift of Life Marrow Registry.
He was a 22-year-old foreign-exchange analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1991, just starting law school when he was diagnosed with leukemia and told that a bone marrow transplant was his only hope.
Knowing that tissue type is influenced by one's ethnic background - inherited like eye color, his friends and relatives widened their search to the unrelated population, focusing on increasing the representation of Ashkenazi Jews.
[4] Feinberg's plight, along with that of Mario Cooper, a graphic design artist, and Erskine Henderson, an attorney at Skadden Arps, was featured in a 1991 article in The New York Times.
[9] In 2019, Feinberg led the establishment of the world's first registry-integrated stem cell collection center, based at Gift of Life's headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida.