Professional Background
Marshall Lichtman was born in 1934 and grew up in the Bronx and in Buffalo, NY. He moved to Rochester, New York in 1960 for his medical residency at the University of Rochester Medical Center. After two years in the Public Health Service at the School of Public Health in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he returned to Rochester in 1965 as Chief Resident in Medicine and would stay at the University of Rochester for the rest of his career. There he devoted himself to the care of patients with blood cell diseases, especially leukemia and lymphoma, conducted research on blood cell diseases, taught medical students and residents in the department of medicine and guided the training of clinical and research fellows in hematology. His research interests have included red cell and leukocyte physiology and biochemistry, hematopoiesis and marrow structure and function, hemoglobin function, the human myelogenous leukemias and related disorders, and other clinical disorders of blood cells. His research has been sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society, the Leukemia Society of America, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Biomedical Research Program, and several foundations.
In addition to providing leadership as Chief of the hematology division, he served as Dean of Academic Affairs and Research for ten years (1979-89) and, subsequently, as Dean of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry for six years (January 1990 through December 1995). He has served on the National Institutes of Health Study Section, as Chair of the peer review group of the Division of Biological and Medical Research of the U.S. Navy and Chair of the Scientific Council of the American Red Cross, Holland Research Laboratories (1987-95). He has been President of the American Society of Hematology (1989), Executive Vice-President of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, a member of the Board of Governors of the American Red Cross (1990-96), and was appointed by Governor Mario Cuomo to the Council for Graduate Medical Education of the State of New York (1991-94) and to the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York (2010-18) by Governor David Patterson (2010) and reappointed by Governor Andrew Cuomo (2012).
Dr. Lichtman has served on the editorial board of nine scientific journals and as the editor-in-chief of Blood Cells, Molecules, and Diseases (2000-13). He has been the editor of three monographs and five textbooks of hematology, including the 3rd through 10th edition of a leading textbook of hematology. He has conducted research and authored over 400 hundred scientific articles, reviews, editorials, letters, books, and book chapters on the physiology, biochemistry, and disorders of blood cells and more recently on the history of hematology and medicine. In December 2017, he was given the Wallace H. Coulter Award for Lifetime Achievement in Hematology by the American Society of Hematology.
In 2018, needing a reprieve from the harsh Rochester winters and to be closer to their daughters as they aged, Dr. Lichtman and his wife of 63 years (married 1957), Alice Jo, moved to Playa Vista, Los Angeles County, CA. Rochester is and always will remain close to his heart and he continues his many friendships and connections to the medical center and community as Professor Emeritus of Medicine and of Biochemistry and Biophysics and Dean Emeritus of the School of Medicine and Dentistry. At age 88 years (2022), Dr. Lichtman continues to serve as an author of eleven chapters and one of the editors of the tenth edition of the leading textbook "Williams Hematology", which was published in March 2021, and has coedited a text "Williams Hematology:The Red Cell and Its Diseases" published in October 2021 and the 10th edition of "Williams Manual of Hematology" published in March 2022..