Hoxworth Blood Center Announces Leadership Transition

Hoxworth Blood Center, University of Cincinnati (UC), announced last week that Caroline Alquist, MD, PhD, chief transplant and cellular therapies officer, and David Oh, MD, MHA, chief medical officer, will serve as the organization’s interim co -directors. Alquist and Oh will assume their new roles on June 3, when the current director José Cancelas, MD, PhD, CABP, departs the organization.

Alquist, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, joined Hoxworth in 2020 and currently serves as the division director for cellular therapies, transplantation immunology, and apheresis. She is the past chair of the Donor History Questionnaire HPC Task Force and continues to serve on AABB’s Abstract Selection and Awards Committees, as well as the Therapeutic Apheresis and Leadership Subsections.

Oh, also an associate professor at the UC College of Medicine, joined the University of Cincinnati in 2017. He will continue as the UC Medical Center Transfusion Medicine/Blood Bank medical director and as the director of the Hoxworth Transfusion Medicine/Blood Banking Fellowship Program while leading all medical student, resident, and fellow transfusion medicine education.

Following 23 years of service at Hoxworth, Cancelas is joining Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, where he will be the executive director of the Connell-O’Reilly Cell Manipulation Core Facility and hold an endowed professorship at Harvard Medical School. Under his leadership, Hoxworth became the only academic unit formed by a blood center in the United States, and he significantly expanded clinical activities and conducted groundbreaking bench and clinical research.

Cancelas is the current vice president of AABB, where he has been an active member since 2002. He is a past chair of the Scientific Committee of the Education Program Committee and a current member of the AABB Foundation Board of Directors and the AABB Abstract Review Committee. Cancelas is also a scientific member of the Biomedical Excellence for Safer Transfusion (BEST) Collaborative.