Gay M. Crooks is the Rebecca Smith Endowed Professor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics in the David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM), UCLA. She is Director of the DGSOM I3T research theme (Immunology, Infection, Inflammation and Transplantation) and Director of the Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Program, Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA. She is also an active member of the Broad Stem Cell Research Center at UCLA.

Dr. Crooks is a physician scientist with clinical expertise in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for children with hematologic malignancies and genetic disorders of blood and immunity. Her laboratory research spans the basic biology of hematopoiesis and the thymus to the pre-clinical development of pluripotent stem cell-based T cell immunotherapies for cancer.

Dr. Crooks graduated from medical school at the University of Western Australia and completed her Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians (FRACP) in pediatrics at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children in Perth prior to her fellowship training in Pediatric Hematology-Oncology at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA). In 1993, she joined the faculty of the University of Southern California and established her laboratory and clinical programs in the Division of Research Immunology and Bone Marrow Transplantation at CHLA. In 2009 she moved her stem cell research program to UCLA, and her clinical activities to the Division of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology at Mattel Children's Hospital, UCLA.