Dr. Avigan received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and completed his M.D. at Yale University School of Medicine. He did his internal medicine and residency training at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, and was the chief resident of Internal Medicine. He was a fellow, and later, chief fellow in Hematology/Oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and research fellow at Rockefeller University. He is currently the Chief of the Division of Hematology and Hematologic Malignancies at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Avigan has established a translational research program for cancer vaccines at BIDMC as part of the Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center. Laboratory efforts have focused on the development of dendritic cell based vaccines including a model in which patient derived tumor cells are fused with dendritic cells as a novel patient specific vaccine. Based on these findings, he has supervised a series of clinical trials to examine the immunologic and clinical efficacy of this vaccine strategy for patients with hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. His work has been supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation.