Harry Paul Erba MD, PhD

Harry Paul Erba, MD, Ph.D., serves as an instructor in the Department of Medicine at Duke University. He is also director of the Leukemia Program in the Division of Hematologic Malignancies and Cellular Therapy, Department of Medicine, at the Duke Cancer Institute, and medical director of the Hematologic Malignancies Inpatient Service at Duke University Hospital. He has been chair of the SWOG Leukemia Committee since 2012. His current positions as director of the Leukemia Program at Duke University and chair of the SWOG Leukemia Committee enable him to continue his passion for the development of new agents for people with acute and chronic leukemia.

Dr. Erba worked as a research assistant in the laboratory of Dr. Joseph Gall as an undergraduate at Yale University studying organization and transcription of the eukaryotic genome. Recombinant DNA technology was in its infancy at this time. After graduation from Yale University, he spent 1 year in England on a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship Award. He helped to establish recombinant DNA techniques in a laboratory in the Department of Zoology at the University of Leicester. While in England, he decided to pursue an MD/Ph.D. so that he could ultimately apply his knowledge of molecular biology to a better understanding of the human disease. He attended the Medical Scientist Training Program at Stanford University, where he investigated the structure and expression of the human actin gene family.