We are pleased to announce we are the official Social Media Sponsors for the 1804List Event in New York on November 12th. The next couple of weeks leading up to the ceremony, we will highlight the 2016 Haitian Roundtable inductees to the 1804 List of Haitian-American Changemakers and One’s To Watch.
Natasha Archer, Pediatric Hematologist, Boston Children’s Hospital
Dr. Natasha Archer is a physician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and instructor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She received her medical degree from Yale University School of Medicine and completed a combined residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital in Internal Medicine/Pediatrics. Dr. Archer completed a Fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She has done extensive work in Haiti, where she established a sickle cell disease management program. Dr. Archer is one of two 2016 ASH-AMFDP recipients.
Dr. Archer’s work has focused on exploration of the epidemiology of blood and cancer disorders in Haiti and efforts to develop safe and cost-effective strategies to address them. In Haiti, she has established a newborn screening and management program for sickle cell disease. She is in the process of testing the effectiveness of an illustrative education curriculum for Haitian parents of newborns recently diagnosed with sickle cell disease. While developing the sickle cell disease program in Haiti, she has also worked on a number of domestic clinical research projects that assess the role of clinical testing. She hopes that investigations focused on clinical testing will also inform her practice in resource-limited settings.
Learn more about Dr. Archer in this interview with Hematology
How does the research you’re currently working on tie into your research and clinical interests – sickle cell disease and global health?
I have spent the last three years helping establish a sickle cell disease clinic in Haiti. In Haiti, sickle cell disease and malaria are highly prevalent. Given hemoglobin degradation is necessary for malaria growth, I questioned whether treating my sickle cell disease patients with hydroxyurea, a medication that increases the percent of fetal hemoglobin and decreases sickle cell related complications, might influence their risk of severe malaria. This led me to propose my current project; investigating the effect of fetal hemoglobin on malaria infectivity.
