Bertram Lubin, M.D.

An executive officer of a California Research Institute
Appointed by the Controller

Dr. Lubin is currently serving as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland.

Throughout his career in medicine, Dr. Lubin has directed his energies to fostering biomedical research and has been involved in a number of clinical and basic research projects. His primary research interest has been in sickle cell disease. He developed a Sickle Cell Screening, Counseling, and Education Program at Children’s Hospital Oakland (CHO), and subsequently with a UCSF colleague, started the Northern California Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center, a program that is in its twenty-third year of NIH funding. Lubin was a member of the NIH Executive Committee that initiated the Cooperative Study of Sickle Cell Disease, a program that supported clinical research in sickle cell disease for over fifteen years. He is an editor of the NIH-published monograph "Current Treatment for Sickle Cell Anemia."

In addition to his interest in clinical hematology, Lubin directed a NIH-funded basic research program to study membrane phospholipid organization in human red blood cells. His group discovered that alterations in membrane phospholipids occurred when cells containing sickle hemoglobin were deoxygenated and that these changes could contribute to clinical events that occur in sickle cell anemia.

Recently, Lubin began the CHO Related Donor Cord Blood Program. The program is offered to families across the United States who currently have a child with a blood disorder such as sickle cell anemia, thalassemia, aplastic anemia, or leukemia, and are expecting another child. Following the birth of a healthy child, blood remaining in the placenta (cord blood) is harvested. Because cord blood is enriched with bone marrow cells, it is cyropreserved and can later be used for
transplantation. A number of lives have been saved following transplantation with cord blood units collected in this program.

Dr. Lubin has many general interests in pediatric research and research education. These range from asthma, obesity, diabetes, and nutrition to studies of the neonate. He is particularly interested in how environmental factors interact with genetics to cause disease. He is involved in the UC Berkeley Pediatric Environmental Health Center, providing core laboratory services to investigate the effects of pesticide exposure during pregnancy on the health of children. He is the director of the Pediatric Clinical Research Center at Children’s Hospital Oakland, the director of an Institutional Post-Doctoral Training Program, and the director of a Short Term Minority Training Program for Undergraduate Students, all of which are NIH-supported. He participates in a number of projects with NIH staff, has served on many NIH peer-review committees, has been a reviewer for many biomedical scientific journals, and is on a number of biomedical advisory committees.