Jeanne Hendrickson, MD

Jeanne Hendrickson, MD, associate director of Yale Medicine’s Transfusion Medicine Program has reassuring news for people worried about potential dangers associated with receiving a blood transfusion. “Blood transfusion products are safer today than they have ever been in our lifetime,” reports Dr. Hendrickson, a pediatric hematologist by training. She oversees the many steps involved with Yale Medicine’s blood bank and blood product transfusion requests. 

Dr. Henderson also leads the apheresis clinic at Yale Cancer Center’s Smilow Hospital. Apheresis is a procedure that involves removing a patient’s blood, separating its components, and then transferring a portion of it back to the patient. 

“I like being able to help patients directly in the clinical setting and also do translational research in my lab,” Dr. Hendrickson says. In her research, she studies why some people experience red blood cell alloimmunization (which is the body's rejection of new blood, even of the same type) after receiving a transfusion. 

Dr. Hendrickson, who is the first in her family to study medicine, says that she enjoys sharing her enthusiasm for the profession with the next generation of physician-scientists who pass through Yale Medicine. She is a professor of laboratory medicine and of pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine.