Sallie Permar | Professor and Chair, Department of Pediatrics
Weill Cornell Medical College

Dr. Sallie Permar is the Nancy C. Paduano Professor and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and Pediatrician-in-Chief at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children's Hospital of Children’s Hospital of New York. She is also Professor of Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.

Dr. Permar is an internationally recognized physician-scientist whose work focuses on the prevention and treatment of neonatal viral infections. Her research has advanced maternal and neonatal vaccine development for pediatric viral infections, including HIV, cytomegalovirus (CMV), and Zika, as well as immunologic strategies to cure pediatric HIV. She leads a research laboratory investigating immune protection against vertical transmission of viral pathogens. Among her key contributions are the development of vaccines to prevent vertical HIV transmission, identification of immune responses linked to infant HIV protection, and development of in preclinical maternal/infant nonhuman primate models that inform clinical trials. In the field of CMV, she has defined determinants of congenital and perinatal transmission, developed the first nonhuman primate model of congenital CMV infection, and led human cohort studies identifying immune correlates of protection necessary for vaccine development. Her work on Zika virus originated primate models to study maternal and fetal pathogenesis and resulted in the isolation of a potential monoclonal antibody now in preclinical testing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Permar assessed immune responses to vaccines in pregnant and lactating individuals, launched clinical trials that produced several publications, and advocated for policy changes to ensure early inclusion of these populations in future vaccine trials.

She earned her Ph.D. in Microbiology/Immunology from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and her M.D. from Harvard Medical School, completing clinical training in pediatrics and pediatric infectious diseases at Boston Children’s Hospital. She has received several prestigious investigator awards, including Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the FASEB Excellence in Science Mid-Career Investigator Award, the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s Oswald Avery Award, the Society for Pediatric Research E. Mead Johnson Award, and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society’s 2025 Stanley A. Plotkin Award for her work in infectious disease vaccines. She has been inducted into the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) and the American Association of Advancement of Science.  In 2020, she received the Oswald Avery Award for Early Achievement from the Infectious Diseases Society of America and in 2022, Dr. Permar received the Excellence in Science Mid-Career Investigator Award from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). She is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association of American Physicians of Pediatrics, among others.

Her professional service includes leadership roles on multiple boards and advisory groups. She served as Vice President of the National CMV Foundation until 2024 and as a member of the AAMC MOSAIC Advisory Board until 2025. She currently sits on the St. Jude Children’s Research Scientific Advisory Board, co-leads the Era of the Child: National Medicaid Reform Workgroup, directs the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) Pediatric Scientist Development Program, serves as an Area Leader for the AMSPDC Pediatric Workforce Initiative, and is the co-founder of Seen & Heard, serving as the “AARP for Kids”.