Dr. John Tisdale

Dr. John Tisdale received his medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston after obtaining his B.A. in Chemistry from the College of Charleston. He completed an internal medicine and chief residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville and then trained in hematology in the Hematology Branch, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), where he served as a postdoctoral fellow.

He joined the Molecular and Clinical Hematology Branch of NHLBI in 1998 and is now the Chief of the Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics Branch. In 2020 the College of Charleston recognized Dr. Tisdale as one of their Top 25 History makers in honor of the school’s 250-year anniversary and was Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal finalist.

He was recently elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and is a member of the American Society of Hematology. He serves as an editorial board member of the journals Stem Cells, Experimental Hematology, and Molecular Therapy Methods & Clinical Development.

He is a frequent ad hoc reviewer for Blood, New England Journal of Medicine, Human Gene Therapy, and Nature Medicine Experimental Hematology Molecular Therapy to name a few. He has served on the NIDDK/NIAMS Institutional Review Board for over 15 years, is a founding member of the NIH Bone Marrow Transplant Consortium, and is an active member of the NIH Intramural Gene Therapy Task Force. Dr. Tisdale’s research and clinical work center on sickle cell disease.

His group focuses on developing curative strategies for sickle cell disease through transplantation of allogeneic or genetically modified autologous bone marrow stem cells. He has published over 200 first- and co-author publications.