Sara Pai | Professor of Surgery
Yale University School of Medicine

Sara Isabel Pai, MD, PhD, FACS:  Dr. Pai is Professor of Surgery at Yale University School of Medicine. 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 medical school, she completed her otolaryngology-head and neck surgery residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital.   She has sought an academic career that merges her immunology and clinical trials background with head and neck surgical oncology interests.  Her research interests focus on better understanding how human papillomavirus (HPV) evades the immune system and strategies that can be applied to reactivate the host immune response against the HPV-associated tumors through vaccines and immune modulatory drugs.  She leads several investigator-initiated immunotherapy clinical trials and has a research laboratory that has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and industry since 2007.  She serves on national and international grant and strategic review panels as well as serves on the advisory boards for several pharmaceutical companies.