The Board of Directors and the Steering Committee of the Society of Hematologic Oncology (SOHO) are pleased to announce that John DiPersio, MD, PhD, assumed the position of SOHO president on September 62025. He will oversee the society during the 2025-2026 term and will chair the 14th Annual Meeting of SOHO scheduled for September 9-12, 2026, in Houston, Texas.
Dr. DiPersio is the Virginia E and Sam J Golman Professor in Medicine and director of the Center for Gene and Cellular Immunotherapy at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, where he specializes in hematologic oncology, specifically in leukemia genomics and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.
Dr. DiPersio was born in Boston but grew up in Scituate, Massachusetts, where his father was a pilot for the US Air Force. He completed his undergraduate studies and earned a bachelor’s degree in biology, magna cum laude, from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1973, followed by an MD/PhD in microbiology from the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, in 1980.
In 1980, Dr. DiPersio went to Texas to pursue further training, completing an internship and residency in internal medicine at Parkland Memorial Hospital at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he served as chief resident during his final year in training. He later completed a fellowship in hematology-oncology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine.
After several years as faculty at UCLA and then at the University of Rochester, where he was the first director of the Bone Marrow Transplant Program, Dr. DiPersio joined Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis in 1994 to take on the role of head of the Transplant Division, later becoming chief of the Division of Oncology, which has grown significantly under his leadership and is one of the largest oncology divisions in the United States.
For SOHO 2026, Dr. DiPersio’s chosen theme is titled, “Advancing care through collaborative science,” which will focus on partnerships to sustain research amid funding challenges.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. DiPersio!
