Patricia AR Brunker, DPhil, MD

Patricia AR Brunker, MSc, MHS, MD, D.Phil.(Oxon) joins the Blood Transfusion Service as the Medical Director for Patient Services after having served as the medical director of the American Red Cross Greater Chesapeake & Potomac Region for five years and as an Assistant Professor of Pathology, in the Division of Transfusion Medicine, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for eight. Patty's training includes an M.Sc. in biological anthropology and human population genetics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, where she studied host genetics of HIV-1 infection and disease progression in Uganda and M.H.S. from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She did her medical training at Dartmouth and Brown Medical Schools and completed an internship in general surgery and residency in anatomic and clinical pathology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital of Harvard Medical School. Her clinical fellowship in Transfusion Medicine at Johns Hopkins was followed by 2 years of postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health on the genetic diversity of the Rh blood group system before taking a faculty position back at Hopkins. She has developed research projects on donor motivations in the African-American community, and basic science work on the genetics of alloimmunization, focusing on pregnancy, using an evolutionary approach to alloimmune responses to transfusion. She has supervised several research projects as part of the Specialist in Blood Banking (SBB) training programs at both NIH and Hopkins as well as a post-doctoral research fellow at Hopkins.