Roles
Chief, Division of Hematology
Chief, Oncology Service Line, UHealth Tower
Professor
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Biography
Mikkael Sekeres is Professor of Medicine with Tenure and Chief of the Division of Hematology at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He earned a medical degree and a master’s degree in clinical epidemiology from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Dr Sekeres completed his postgraduate training at Harvard University, finishing an internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and a fellowship in hematology-oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He is chair of the medical advisory board of the Aplastic Anemia and Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS) International Foundation, chairs the American Society of Hematology (ASH) Treatment Guidelines for Older Adults with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and served on a number of ASH committees including the Executive Committee, and formerly chaired the Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee of the F.D.A.
Dr Sekeres’ research focuses on patients with MDS and older adults with AML, and he has been the national and international primary study investigator on dozens of phase I/II/III trials. He is the author or co-author of over 450 peer-reviewed manuscripts and 650 abstracts, with an H-index of 100. He was the inaugural editor-in-chief of the ASH Clinical News magazine; he is on the editorial board of several journals and is Associate Editor for the Journal of Clinical Oncology and a Section Editor for UpToDate; has written over 100 essays for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, Slate, and The Hill, among others; and has authored 8 books, including When Blood Breaks Down: Life Lessons from Leukemia (The MIT Press 2020); Drugs and the FDA: Safety, Efficacy, and the Public’s Trust (The MIT Press 2022); and a book tentatively titled Chasing Truth in Cancer (University of Toronto Press, 2026). -
Education & Training
Education
Licensures and Certifications
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Honors & Awards
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Teaching Interests
I have had the privilege of teaching the principles and practice of hematology, with a focus on myeloid malignancies, at the medical student, resident/fellow, and post-graduate continuing medical education levels for the past 18 years while on faculty at Cleveland Clinic. In addition, given some of my other experiences working at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and as a clinical trialist, and as an essayist for the scientific and lay press, I have given talks at all of these levels on regulatory issues surrounding hematology/oncology drug approval, and on narrative medicine.
The education I have provided also runs the gamut of styles and formats, from one-on-one teaching and mentoring in clinic, at the bedside in the hospital, or on specific research projects; to leading of interactive seminars, both in person and using a Zoom/webinar format; all the way to lectures for 2000 people. I have been both a participant and on organizer of teaching conferences on the local, national, and international level, the largest being co-chair of the 2018 Education Program at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting, which involved over 100 lectures for about 30,000 people. -
Research Interests
My academic focus over the past 20 years has been on patients with myeloid malignancies, specifically myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in older adults. I took the approach of asking research questions about each step in the course of a patient’s disease, from diagnosis to cure or death, to better understand it, predict outcomes, and improve patient experience and survival.These questions include investigating the epidemiologic factors that led to a patient’s diagnosis and examining what contributes to treatment decision-making; identifying prognostic factors for treatment response and survival at diagnosis and dynamically, over time; exploring novel therapies and therapeutic combinations; improving clinical trial design in the context of clinically meaningful regulatory endpoints; and identifying appropriate translational correlates, from bedside to bench and back, again dynamically and with a focus on the genetics of myeloid neoplasia, to illuminate the underlying pathobiology and to make biologically relevant clinical associations. -
Publications
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Professional Activities
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