Dr. Sara Pai is an Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from Dartmouth College with a major in biochemistry and molecular biology. After graduating Dartmouth, she completed the MD/PhD program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in which she obtained her PhD training in cancer immunology and vaccines. After completing her residency in otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, she joined its faculty in 2007 where she led a therapeutic human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine clinical trial which was supported by the Head and Neck Cancer SPORE program. In 2014, she was recruited to join the faculty in the Department of Surgery at Mass General. Her research interests focus on better understanding how HPV can evade the immune system and strategies that can be applied to reactivate the host immune response against the virus through vaccines and immune modulatory drugs. She leads several HPV-related investigator-initiated clinical immunotherapy trials and has a research laboratory that is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as industry. She serves on grant and strategic review panels at the NIH and international government sponsored programs in the UK, Hong Kong and Portugal. She is on the editorial board of lead scientific journals as well as serves on the advisory boards for several pharmaceutical companies.