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Dr. Rafii, 43, is Associate Professor of Medicine at Cornell Medical College in New York. Dr. Rafii received his MD degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1986, and received post-doctoral training at Cornell Medical Center prior to joining the faculty of Cornell Medical College in 1994. His research interest is the hematopoietic microenvironment that is critical for the self-renewal, proliferation, and differentiation of pluripotent hematopoietic stem cells. He is the originator of a technique for the isolation and cultivation of adult bone marrow micro vascular endothelium (BMEC) and fetal liver endothelial cells (FLEC), and was the first to show that BMEC and FLEC monolayers support the trafficking as well as long-term proliferation and terminal-differentiation of CD34+ hematopoietic progenitors. The major focus of his laboratory continues to be the isolation and characterization of adhesion and membrane-bound cytokines expressed by endothelium that regulate proliferation and adhesion of hematopoietic stem cells and their progenitor.
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