Karina Yazdanbakhsh Receives NHBLI's Outstanding Investigator Award

Karina Yazdanbakhsh, PhD, a 2016 National Blood Foundation Hall of Fame inductee, has received the prestigious National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Outstanding Investigator Award. The award provides long-term support and increased flexibility to investigators with “outstanding records of research” that demonstrate their ability to make major contributions to heart, lung, blood and sleep research.

The award will provide Yazdanbakhsh and her team seven years of funding support, close to $6.5 million, to advance understanding of how the immune system of patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) inadvertently contributes to a range of health problems from transfusion reactions to organ failure. The research may lead to novel diagnostics and innovative immunotherapeutic approaches to prevent and treat SCD complications.

Yazdanbakhsh is the vice president and director of research development at the New York Blood Center’s Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute. She received an NBF early-career Scientific Research Grant in 2000 to study recombinant antigens as tools for the identification of alloantibodies in patients' sera.

AABB and the NBF congratulate Yazdanbakhsh and encourage members of the AABB community to support promising early-career investigators by contributing to the NBF today.