Dr. Sarantopoulos is an Associate Professor in Medicine at Duke University in the Division of Hematological Malignancies and Stem Cell Therapies. Dr. Stefanie Sarantopoulos received her MD and PhD degrees from Boston University School of Medicine before completing postgraduate training in Internal Medicine at Boston Medical Center where she also served as Chief Medical Resident. Her PhD graduate studies entailed engineering antibody libraries to patient’s tumors. She completed her fellowship in hematology and oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where she began her studies on B cells as an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Sarantopoulos was a Leukemia & Lymphoma Society fellow, a 2008 Forbeck Scholar, and a 2009 recipient of the Amy Strelzer-Manazevit Scholar award.

A major goal of Dr. Sarantopoulos’ research is to develop effective and safe bone marrow transplant (also known as allogeneic stem cell transplantation, HCT) so that we can cure patients with refractory hematological malignancies. A major hindrance to long-term success of HCT is chronic graft versus host disease (cGVHD). Chronic GVHD develops in 30-70% of patients, carrying an impact on patient quality of life and survival that has not improved significantly over the last 30+ years. In addition to heading a lab, Dr. Sarantopoulos sees patients with blood and marrow cancers in the Duke Adult Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) and chronic GVHD multi-disciplinary clinic. Dr. Sarantopoulos’ research program at Duke is aimed at understanding immunopathologic mechanisms underpinning human cGVHD, so that targeted therapies can be developed for patients.

Dr. Sarantopoulos serves on scientific planning committees for both The American Society of Hematology and the Tandem BMT meetings. She actively served on two separate NIH transplantation biology consensus projects, and is acting co-chair of a committee for the Center for an International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR).