Ligia Pinto | Directorate Director
Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research

Dr. Ligia Pinto is the director of the Vaccine, Immunity and Cancer Directorate at the Frederick National Laboratory. She has worked in the area of immunology of infectious diseases, cancer and vaccines for the last 38 years, with over 200 peer-reviewed publications. She completed her Ph.D. in 1995 at the Experimental Immunology Branch, National Institutes of Health, after several years of research on cellular immunology of HIV infection at the University of Lisbon, School of Medicine in Portugal. She continued her postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health where she focused on investigating immunological alterations induced by HIV, HIV vaccine candidates and host protective immune responses controlling HIV replication and associated pathogenesis.  In 2001, she joined the Frederick National Laboratory to establish the HPV Immunology Laboratory. The work from her laboratory has played a critical role in the understanding of the systemic and mucosal immune responses induced by the licensed HPV vaccines in clinical trials and promoted the development of an International HPV Serology Standardization Initiative in 2017, the establishment of the HPV Serology Laboratory and the Cancer Immunoprevention Laboratory.   In March 2020, Dr. Pinto pivoted to COVID-19 and established the Serological Sciences Network (SeroNet). SeroNet was the largest coordinated serology initiative in the United States, launched to study the immune responses to SARS-CoV-2, as part of the NCI response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her program managed SeroNet from 2020 to 2025.  In 2025, Dr. Pinto established the Gene Therapy Immunology and Standards Laboratory under her directorate.