CBA Officers Re-Elected; New Director Appointed

Issued:  June 22, 2017

Joanne Kurtzberg, MD, director of the Carolinas Cord Blood Bank, Durham, N.C., has been re-elected president of the Cord Blood Association. The election of officers occurred at the annual meeting of the association’s Board of Directors at the International Cord Blood Symposium in San Diego.

Others re-elected to office were:

Vice president – Kenneth Giacin, MS, MBA, Vice Chairman and Director, StemCyte International, Covina, Calif.

Secretary – Gesine Kögler, PhD, Director, Jose Carreras Cord Blood Bank and GMP Facility, University of Düsseldorf Medical Center, Düsseldorf, Germany

Treasurer – David Blackett, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy, PerkinElmer Viacord, Waltham, Mass.

Nicholas Grund, MBA, executive vice president and chief commercial officer of AMAG Pharmaceuticals, has been appointed to the CBA Board of Directors. AMAG Pharmaceuticals is the corporate parent of Cord Blood Registry based in San Bruno, Calif. 

Mr. Grund, who has held senior management positions at Sanofi, Genzyme and Bayer Diagnostics before joining AMAG in 2016, was appointed to complete the term of a vacant seat on the CBA Board of Directors.

CBA bylaws require that the 17-member board have a “tripartite” membership.  Five seats are designated for representatives of public banks, five reserved for private or family banks, and seven are for the banking community at large. The at-large directors may be research investigators, transplant clinicians, patients, parents, obstetricians, pediatricians, nurses, midwives, vendors, health policy experts or regulatory officials.

Other members of the CBA Board of Directors are:

Jaap Jan Boelens, MD, PhD, Pediatrician-Oncologist/Immunologist, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Haywood Brown, MD, Chair, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, N.C., USA

Deepak Chhabra, BSc, DBM, Chief Executive Officer, StemCyte India, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

Calvin Cole, President/Chief Executive Officer, CariCord, Aurora, Colo, USA

Salmaan Dalvi, PhD, Director of Cord Blood and Stem Cell Programmes, Precious Cells, Uxbridge, United Kingdom

Colleen Delaney, MD, MSc, Director, Program in Cord Blood Research and Transplantation, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Wash., USA

Arthur Flatau, PhD, Patient Advocate, Bone Marrow Transplant Survivor, Austin, Texas, USA

Joanie Y. Hare, MD, Maternal Fetal Medicine, Houston Perinatal Associates, Houston, Texas, USA

Elaine Hsieh, MBA, Chair and CEO, Sino Cell Technologies, Taipei, Taiwan

Aby J. Mathew, PhD, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, BioLife Solutions, Inc., Bothell, Wash., USA

Mahendra Rao, MBBS, PhD, Vice President for Regenerative Medicine, New York Stem Cell Foundation, New York, N.Y., USA

Beth H. Shaz, MD, Chief Medical Officer & Senior Vice President, New York Blood Center, New York, N.Y., USA

Alan Leahigh, former executive director of the American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation, is serving as chief executive officer for the association.