Robert D. Bona, MD

Robert Bona, MD, is a Yale Cancer Center hematologist. He cares for individuals with blood disorders, including those with excessive bleeding or clotting, those with low red blood cell (anemia), low platelet, or white cell counts, and those with disorders of iron metabolism. He is the director of the Classical Hematology Program at Smilow Cancer Hospital (which treats non-cancer-related blood disorders) and medical director of the Yale Hemophilia Treatment Center.

Dr. Bona says he has been interested in blood disorders since medical school, where he studied with some of the top experts in the field. “I’ve always been interested in looking at blood cells under the microscope and studying blood coagulation and clotting,” he says.

As a Yale Medicine clinician, he often works with teams that include advanced practitioners, nurses, and other specialized physicians from medicine, laboratory medicine, and transfusion medicine, as well as medical providers from related areas such as surgery and radiology.

For those individuals asking for advice or care, he suggests they come to their visit with a sense of what they want to talk about. “Come with an agenda. It might be to discuss your diagnosis, treatment for your disease, or other diagnostic possibilities if the diagnosis has not yet been made,” he says. If you are coming from a medical center with a different medical record system, making your complete medical record available is important to have an optimal visit. It also helps, if you wish, to bring a family member or friend to talk to us about complex medical issues.”

In addition to his clinical work, Dr. Bona is a professor of medicine (hematology) at Yale School of Medicine. He has strong interests in medical education and research interests in new treatments for people with bleeding or clotting disorders. “The education and training of our next generation of physicians and medical educators is very important to me,” he says.

Prior to coming to Yale, Dr. Bona was a founding faculty member of the Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University. Prior to that, he worked in the Hematology-Oncology division at the University of Connecticut.