Dr. Alexis Thompson

Dr. Alexis Thompson was born in Los Angeles, California. She attended Pomona College and received her MD at Tulane University School of Medicine. She completed her residency in general pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles and a fellowship in pediatric hematology-oncology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She also obtained a master’s degree in public health at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with an emphasis on health services.

Dr. Thompson’s first faculty appointment was at UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital where she was a laboratory researcher and worked on the isolation and characterization of novel B cell specific genes and analysis of their roles in B cell growth and differentiation, as well as analysis of developmentally regulated genes in early hematopoiesis. She was promoted to associate professor of pediatrics at UCLA before moving to Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Children’s Memorial Hospital (now Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago) in 2001 where she was the inaugural medical and scientific director of hematology.

Dr. Thompson was the hematology section head at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, and she held the A. Watson and Sarah Armour Endowed Chair for Blood Diseases and Cancer at Lurie Children’s. She was also a professor of pediatrics at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. For over 12 years, Dr. Thompson was also the associate director for equity and minority health at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. In January 2022, Dr. Thompson returned to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as chief, Division of Hematology, professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and holds the Elias Schwartz MD Endowed Chair in Hematology.

Dr. Thompson has co-authored over 150 papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Her clinical interests include hemoglobinopathies (thalassemia and sickle cell disease), bone marrow failure syndromes, and stem cell transplantation in pediatric patients. In her current position, she is an investigator on multi-center trials, as well as her own institutional clinical studies in thalassemia, sickle cell disease, and ITP.  Her most significant scientific contributions are clinical and translation studies to better understand and treat hemoglobinopathies. She has been a leader in multicenter collaborations, such as the NHLBI-funded Thalassemia Clinical Research Network and the Sickle Cell Disease Implementation Consortium. She has served on regional and national advisory committees for governmental agencies, as well as non-profit organizations focused on improving healthcare access, increasing workforce diversity, and reducing health disparities. She was president of the American Society of Hematology in 2018.