Geoffrey Land, PhD
Geof Land, PhD, HCLD, is currently Professor and Director of Histocompatiblity and Transplant Immunology at The Methodist Hospital - Weill Cornell Medical College in Houston, Texas and Steward Blood Center in Tyler, Texas, as well as the Director of Microbiology at The Methodist Hospital. He has been a member of the Texas Transplantation Society for 25 years and is the current President-Elect. He also served two terms as chair of the Histocompatibility Committee and presented numerous lectures for the Society.
His interests in Transplant Immunology include determining the effects of T and B cell immunomodulation in short and long-term allograft survival in solid organ recipients; the clinical relevance of low level HLA and non-HLA antibodies in short and long term allograft survival; the transplantation and clinical management of highly sensitized patients; determining molecular markers for of the human major and minor human histocompatibility complex alleles as well as the presence of cytokine alleles as predictor(s) of solid organ rejection. Other research interests are development of stable molecular markers for detecting residual leukemic/lymphoma cells in patients on chemotherapy, sequenced-based typing for human histocompatibilty alleles and infectious agents, monitoring engraftment, and development of protocols to detect maternal microchimerism in offspring requiring stem cell transplant. He also serves The Methodist Hospital Research Institute, as Chair of the Institutional Biosafety and Hazardous Substances Committees and is a member of the Institutional Review Board.
Dr. Land's HLA activities at the national level include serving as a Board member, Executive Committee member, President-Elect, and President of ASHI. He was a faculty member for the 2007 ASHI Regional Workshops and the 2010 International Summer School in Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics and has also served ASHI in the areas of quality assurance and standardization of histocompatiblity laboratory procedures and practices by 1) serving as an active ASHI laboratory inspector, 2) serving on the Accreditation Review Board as Commissioner (2 terms), 3) Co-Chair, and 5) Program Director. He was also a Co-Editor for the ASHI Laboratory Manual and Vice-Chair and Chair of the ASHI Director Training Review Committee. Other national committees and offices he has held include Vice-Chairman, Chairman, and current Past-Chair of the UNOS Histocompatibility Committee as well as a member of the UNOS Kidney/Pancreas, Minority Affairs, Membership and Professional Standards, and Electronic Working Group committees. He currently is on the Board and Executive committee of UNOS.