Maria De La Paz Bettinotti, PhD

Maria P. Bettinotti, Ph.D., FACHI, FACMGG is Associate Professor of Pathology and Director of the Immunogenetics Laboratory.

Dr. Bettinotti is an Immunogeneticist and Clinical Molecular Geneticist board-certified by the American Board of Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics and by the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Bettinotti was Director of the Immunogenetics Department at Quest Diagnostics, Nichols Institute in Chantilly, VA. Dr. Bettinotti earned a degree in Biochemistry at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and a Ph.D. in Immunogenetics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet, Munich, Germany. After a post-doctoral fellowship at the Tissue Typing Laboratory, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, she joined the National Institute of Health as a Research Scientist in the Department of Transfusion Medicine, Clinical Center. She is a graduate of the Clinical Molecular Genetics Fellowship Training Program, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD. Dr. Bettinotti is past member of the Board of Directors of the American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics and served on the American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) Molecular Pathology Advisory committee and the Molecular Pathology Coding Workgroup (MPCW). She also serves on the CDC’s GeT-RM program for reference materials for Pharmacogenetics and HLA. Dr. Bettinotti has worked in the field of Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics for more than 25 years. She has published more than 40 peer-reviewed articles, reviews and book chapters, and has given numerous invited talks on the effect of HLA polymorphism on disease susceptibility, pharmacogenetics, immunotherapy and transplantation. A major focus of her work is translating research into clinical care, including clinical laboratory practices and policy. Her current research is focused on the role of HLA in Hematopoietic Stem Cell transplantation with HLA mismatched donors and in solid organ transplantation.