Known for his expertise in the fields of hematopoiesis and acute leukemia, Dr. Aifantis is a Professor and the Chair of the Department of Pathology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He attended the University of Crete in Greece, earned his PhD from the University of Paris V, Rene Descartes and completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard University, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, both under the mentorship of Professor Harald von Boehmer. He started his independent career at University of Chicago in 2013 and joined NYU Grossman in 2006. Throughout his career, he earned many prestigious honors including the 2010 Vilcek Award for Creative Promise and the 2011 McCulloch & Till Award from the International Society for Hematology and Stem Cell Biology. Moreover, in 2009, he was selected as an Early Career Scientist by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). He is one of the leaders of the fields of hematopoiesis and leukemia, with diverse focus areas that include the study of protein stability, transcriptional/epigenetic regulation and tumor microenvironment. His lab was instrumental in the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of initiation and progression of both acute lymphoid and myeloid leukemia. Outstanding contributions from his team include the first in vivo characterization of TET2 roles in myeloid leukemia (Moran-Crusio et al. Cancer Cell, 2011), the involvement of ubiquitin aberrant roles in lymphocytic leukemia (King et al. Cell, 2013), the first 3D chromosomal maps of acute leukemia (Kloetgen et al. Nature Genetics, 2020; Gambi et al. Molecular Cell, 2025) and the single cell mapping of the bone marrow of patients with both ALL and AML (Witkowski et al. Cancer Cell, 2020; Lasry et al. Nature Cancer, 2023). His work has been extensively cited by the scientific community (approximately 34,000 citations, h-index: 100).