Dr. Dennis Todd, PhD, President and CEO of Community Blood Services.

Dr. Dennis M. Todd, PhD, president and CEO of Community Blood Services of NJ/NY, has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP).

Dr. Todd, a resident of Tuxedo, New York, joined Community Blood Services in 2000. He begins his two-year term on the NMDP board in January 2010.

For more than 20 years the mission of the not-for-profit NMDP, based in Minneapolis, has been to save lives through cellular transplantation, providing lifesaving bone marrow or umbilical cord blood transplants to patients who need them.

The NMDP works with bone marrow/stem cell programs like Community Blood Services’ HLA Registry throughout the U.S. to grow its Be The Match Registry, which provides access to more than eight million donors and more than 160,000 cord blood units. It is the largest and most racially and ethnically diverse registry of its kind in the world. Additionally, the NMDP facilitates transplants worldwide; conducts research; and provides education and support services to patients, donors and health care professionals.

Dr. Todd has had many personal experiences with stem cell donations and transplantation. While at Community Blood Services, he has demonstrated his commitment to NMDP’s mission through the acquisition of The HLA Registry, the largest independent bone marrow registry in the United States, and the New Jersey Cord Blood Bank (NJCBB), New Jersey’s only not-for-profit public cord blood bank. Both The HLA and NJCBB are active members of the NMDP.

Dr. Todd graduated from Lehigh University with his MS degree in chemistry and his PhD in chemistry. Before coming to Community Blood Services, he was director of research at St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey; a principal and executive vice president of the GenCare Biomedical Research Corporation in Mountainside, NJ; vice president of operations of Lifecodes Corporation in Elmsford, NY; and assistant director of BioSciences Laboratories in Philadelphia, Pa.

A past president of the New Jersey Academy of Science, Dr. Todd has had various academic appointments and authored and published more than a dozen scientific papers and abstracts. He is a member of The International Society for Cellular Therapy, the American Association of Blood Banks, the New Jersey Society of Blood Bank Professionals, and Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.

Dr. Todd is also the laboratory director and a member of the Board of Trustees at Cellular Analytics, Inc., a not-for-profit company in Paramus, New Jersey committed to providing regionally focused donor screening services to blood centers, hospital donor rooms, cord blood programs, organ procurement organizations and tissue banks in the northeast United States.

In addition to being home to The HLA Registry and the New Jersey Cord Blood Bank, Community Blood Services, whose headquarters is in Oradell, New Jersey, also supplies blood and blood products to more than 30 hospitals in the NJ/NY region.