Carlos Rodriguez-Galindo

Carlos Rodriguez-Galindo, MD, serves as director of St. Jude Global and chair of the Department of Global Pediatric Medicine. He is also an executive vice president and holds the Four Stars of Chicago Endowed Chair in International Pediatric Research. Rodriguez-Galindo is leading an effort by St. Jude to ensure childhood cancer patients have access to quality care no matter where they live. A native of Barcelona, Spain, Rodriguez-Galindo first came to St. Jude in 1994 as a postdoctoral fellow. He went on to serve as a clinical researcher and faculty member for more than a decade before accepting a position in Boston. At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital, he was director of the Pediatric Solid Tumor Program, medical director of the Clinical and Translational Investigations Program, and director of the Global Health Initiative in Pediatric Cancer and Blood Disorders. He also served as professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. In 2015, Rodriguez-Galindo returned to Memphis to lead a new Department of Global Pediatric Medicine and a new initiative, St. Jude Global. At that time, St. Jude had 24 partner sites in 17 countries and addressed 2.4 percent of the global childhood cancer burden. Under Rodriguez-Galindo’s leadership, the program aims to expand St. Jude’s reach to 30 percent in the next decade and to develop the intervention models to ensure access to quality care for all children with cancer in the world. At present, the St. Jude Global Alliance includes more than 170 institutions from more than 60 countries. Additionally, Rodriguez-Galindo led an institutional effort to become the first World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Childhood Cancer. As part of this partnership, WHO and St. Jude are collaborating with other organizations on the Global Initiative in Childhood Cancer. Dr. Rodriguez-Galindo’s areas of clinical research and expertise include retinoblastoma, sarcomas, rare cancers, and histiocytic disorders. He has been the chair of the Rare Tumor’s committee of the Children’s Oncology Group and the President of the Histiocyte Society, and has been the principal investigator of several institutional, national, and international trials. Rodriguez-Galindo earned his medical degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.