I am a physician-scientist committed to improving patient care by integrating bench-top discoveries with clinical trials. I care for patients with hematopoietic diseases and recognize the limited efficacy and significant morbidity associated with current chemotherapies. A better understanding of the molecular mechanisms of leukemic transformation will be required to identify novel therapeutic targets and to refine our current treatment algorithms. My laboratory has approached this problem by using unbiased strategies to characterize genomic changes that may contribute to leukemia. We seek to integrate these finding with clinical outcomes to better understand which patients respond to chemotherapy, why patients relapse, and how better to quantify responses. Our clinical studies have focused on the role of decitabine in AML and MDS, and our molecular studies have focused on retinoid receptors and the cohesins as pathologic pathways in AML, which might be sensitive to therapeutic intervention.