Swee Lay Thein, MD, DSc, is a physician-scientist with more than 30 years of clinical and translational hematology research and extensive personal experience in laboratory research – molecular biology, genetics and genomics. Dr. Thein joined the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute / NIH in spring 2015 as Senior Investigator and Chief of the Institute’s Sickle Cell Branch.
Swee Lay Thein completed her specialist training in general medicine and hematology at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith, and the Royal Free Hospital, London, UK. She also worked in Oxford at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (MRC Molecular Hematology Unit) where she held various positions, including MRC clinical training fellow, Wellcome Senior Fellow in Clinical Science, senior MRC clinical scientist, and at the John Radcliffe Hospital as honorary consultant hematologist. In 2000, she moved to King’s College London/King’s College Hospital, as Professor of Molecular Hematology/consultant hematologist and director of the Red Cell Centre. In 2003, she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci), UK. Her research was chosen by scientists as one of the top 10 biggest science stories in 2022 (The Guardian), and in 2024, she was co-recipient of the Shaw Prize in Life Sciences & Medicine. In 2025 she was inducted into the Association of American Physicians and awarded the Helen M. Ranney prize. In 2025, she was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of sciences.