David Steensma, MD, FACP
Senior Physician, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Boston, MA
“We are living in an exciting era of rapid change in medicine – and also a frightening one. The advent of inexpensive genomic assessment techniques in the clinic (and colossally expensive targeted therapeutic agents) promise to alter how we approach evaluation and treatment of patients with a wide variety of disorders, including the hematological neoplasms and marrow failure syndromes that are my special interest. Yet doctors are becoming clerks and typists even as algorithm-churning machines threaten to automate many of our daily core tasks. For now, an “old-fashioned” organized approach to diagnosis and therapy remains essential in the care of the patient, and I believe the human connections we form as physicians with those who are sick and scared will always be needed.” ~ Dr. Steensma
Dr. David Steensma is a Senior Physician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. After undergraduate work in Physics and Astronomy at Calvin College in Michigan, he attended the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and then completed clinical training in internal medicine, hematology and medical oncology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. After post-doctoral work at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine of the University of Oxford, England, he joined the hematology consulting staff of Mayo Clinic before moving to Boston in 2009. His clinical and research focus is myelodysplastic syndromes and marrow failure disorders. He has led a number of multicenter trials of hypomethylating agents and hematopoietic growth factors in patients with myelodysplastic syndromes, other myeloid neoplasms and marrow failure syndromes. Dr. Steensma has more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and has served as a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Oncology Drug Advisory Committee, section editor for Journal of Clinical Oncology, and education program chair for the American Society of Hematology.
To learn more about Dr. Steensma, visit http://doctors.dana-farber.org/directory/profile.asp?pict_id=2178766.
