Dr. Najfeld is the Director of the Tumor CytoGenomic laboratory and the Professor of Pathology and Medicine/ Hematology-Oncology, Tisch Cancer Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Biology at the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, her M.Phil. degree in Bacterial Genetics at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, and her Ph.D. degree in Cancer Cytogenetics at the University of London, England.

She completed her postdoctoral NIH – funded fellowship, at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research involved delineating events in the multistep pathogenesis of chronic myelogenous leukemia, which served as a groundbreaking work for later investigations on the origin and pathogenesis of other hematological malignancies. In 1981 she established Tumor Cytogenetics, now known as Tumor CytoGenomics laboratory at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in NY to study hematological malignancies. Over the years the laboratory included not only conventional cytogenetics but expanded with FISH and array technologies currently performing ~20,000 cytogenomic clinical tests annually from patients with hematological malignancies. The Tumor Cytogenomics laboratory is an approved clinical trial laboratory for both adult patients registered with Alliance/CALGB and pediatric patients registered with the Children Oncology Group. It is also the core lab for MPN-Research consortium clinical trials, which is an ongoing NIH program project grant that has been running for 15 years. On the national level, Professor Najfeld has been a prominent member of the American Society of Hematology and chaired the Scientific Subcommittee on Neoplasia. She sat on many NIH/NCI grant review committees related to hematological malignancies. She has been on the editorial board of Leukemia, Blood, and Cancer Genetics and Cytogenetics and a scientific reviewer for 15 peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Najfeld is an author of 168 publications in peer-reviewed journals and has written 19 chapters in different hematological books, including the 2023 edition of Hoffman’s Hematology. Her contributions have been recognized with the prestigious Richard E. Rosenfeld Faculty Achievement Award from the Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology, and the 2023 Mount Sinai Alumni Special Recognition Award. She is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both physicians.