Adam Cuker, MD, MS, serves as chair of ASH’s Committee on Quality. He is a professor of medicine and of pathology and laboratory medicine, section chief of hematology, and director of the Penn Comprehensive Hemophilia and Thrombosis Program at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1. If you were to compile a bucket list, what would top that list?
Play in a Major League Baseball game (not gonna happen).
2. What ASH luminary do you most admire? (Who’s your ASH-lebrity?)
So many to choose from, but I’ll go with Jim George, a man of great warmth and integrity who helped blaze a path for patient-oriented researchers in hematology like me.
3. What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
Be a mensch. Everything else is unimportant.
4. When I’m down, _____ brings me up.
Listening to certain select songs on my playlist, which somehow have the power to reset my mood.
5. What’s your one can’t-miss presentation or event at the ASH annual meeting?
The Special Symposium on Quality.
6. What’s your hidden talent?
In a past life, I used to write poems. A few of them were decent.
7. If you could wave a wand and change one thing about the practice of medicine, what would that be?
Poof! I would make the patient portal disappear.
8. What do you see as the next big advance in hematology?
I think AI will revolutionize the way we search for information, the way we make clinical decisions, the way we communicate with patients, and the way we document our patient encounters.
9. When starting my career, I wish I had known …
What an incredibly fulfilling career I would have in academic hematology. Had I known, I would not have agonized over and questioned my decision early on.
10. What’s your favorite movie?
Dead Poets Society.
