A Tour of Your Circulatory System (First Graphics: Body Systems) by Karen Ballen

Dr. Karen Ballen received her MD at Dartmouth College and then completed an Internal Medicine internship and residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, and a Hematology/Oncology fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. She has held several attending physician appointments including Transplant Physician, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Children's Hospital, Boston; Director, Bone Marrow Transplant Unit, UMass Memorial Health Care; and Acting Division Director, Medical Oncology, UMass Memorial Health Care. Dr. Ballen is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and director of the leukemia program, Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research interests focus on novel therapies for leukemia and transplantation. A particular area of specialty is cord blood transplantation for those patients who do not have matched related or unrelated donors. Dr. Ballen's research has focused on improving outcomes after cord blood transplantation, and she has led multiple clinical trials focusing on double cord blood transplantation in adults, cord blood homing strategies, graft vs. host disease prophylaxis and infection prophylaxis. She has authored more than 100 papers in this field.