Meet our Medical Council

The Council advises the DKMS Board; they also nominate the annual winner of the DKMS Mechtild Harf Science Award.

Professor Marcel R.M. van den Brink - Chairman

Marcel R.M. van den Brink, MD, PhD, is a leading oncologist with extensive experience in both laboratory and clinical research, specialising in strategies to improve allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT). He is the President and Chief Physician Executive at City of Hope Los Angeles and National Medical Center, one of the largest cancer research and treatment organisations in the United States.

Professor Thomas Klingebiel

Thomas Klingebiel, MD, has been the Director of the Paediatric Oncology, Haematology and Haemostaseology Clinic at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main since 2000. He also serves as the Director of the Centre for Paediatric and Adolescent Medicine in Frankfurt. The paediatric stem cell transplantation centre in Frankfurt is one of the leading centres in Germany.

Professor Dieter Hoelzer

Dieter Hoelzer was the Director of the Department of Haematology/Oncology, Rheumatology and Infectious Diseases at the Frankfurt University Hospital for more than 20 years. He has extensive clinical experience with inpatient and outpatient treatment of all haematological/oncological and internal diseases.

Professor Hoelzer is one of the most renowned haematologists and specialists in the field of acute lymphatic leukaemia. He was also awarded the DKMS Mechtild Harf Science Award in 2017.

Professor Katharina Fleischhauer

Katharina Fleischhauer studied medicine in Bonn and spent four years as a Research Associate at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. From 1992 to 2013 she worked at the Istituto Scientifico San Raffaele in Milan, including as Head of the Immunogenetic Diagnostics and Research Laboratory.

Since October 2013, Professor Fleischhauer has led the Institute for Cell Therapeutic Research at the Essen University Hospital. She specialises in the research of T-cell alloreactivity in allogeneic stem cell transplantation. She was awarded with the DKMS Mechtild Harf Science Award in 2016.

Stephen J. Forman, MD

Stephen J. Forman, MD, leads the City of Hope’s Haematologic Malignancies and Stem Cell Transplantation Institute and the Francis & Kathleen McNamara Distinguished Chair in Haematology and Haematopoietic Cell Transplantation in Los Angeles. He was awarded the 2019 DKMS Mechtild Harf Science Award in honour of his outstanding achievements in cancer immunology, haematology, stem cell transplantation, and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy.

Stephen Forman’s research is focused on combining CMV-specific T cells and a CAR against the leukaemia and lymphoma biomarker CD19. City of Hope’s CAR T-Cell Program has 16 active clinical trials and has treated nearly 300 patients.

Dr. Marcelo Fernández-Viña

Marcelo Fernández-Viña, PhD, is a professor for the Department of Pathology at Stanford University Medical School. He also serves as Director of the Histocompatibility, Immunogenetics and Disease Profiling Laboratory.

Marcelo Fernández-Viña has been working in the fields of Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics since 1982.
He has more than 220 peer-reviewed publications, many of them focusing on HLA variation in multiple world populations, identifying susceptibility and resistance factors for diseases and the impact of HLA mismatches in allogeneic transplantation.