Elaine Jaffe

Elaine Sarkin Jaffe (born in August 1943) is an American pathologist and senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute specializing in hematopathology. She completed her medical education at Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania, receiving her M.D. degree from University of Pennsylvania in 1969. After an internship at Georgetown University she joined NCI as a resident in anatomic pathology, and has been a senior investigator since 1974, focusing on the classification and definition of lymphomas.

Early life and education Jaffe is the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who fled Russia during World War I. As a child in White Plains, New York, Jaffe was drawn to the sciences, particularly astronomy and geology. In an interview she states, "I fell in love with biology and decided in high school that I was going to become a doctor." She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University, and completed her medical education at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1960s, where she was one of only five women in a class of more than 100 medical students. Jaffe was the president of the Society of Hematopathology at the time that the WHO's Revised European-American Classification of Lymphoid Neoplasms (REAL) classification system was developed in 1994; the REAL classification system is now considered the gold standard in hematopathology. Today, her research includes genetic and epigenetic studies aimed at understanding how B-cells become Hodgkin's lymphoma cells, particularly through the lens of the microenvironment. In 1993, Jaffe was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2005 she was chair of the Medical Sciences Section of AAAS and in 2007 she was the second Anita Roberts Lecturer at the NIH.