Speaker

Judy Lieberman, MD, PhD holds an Endowed Chair in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital and is Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard. Her lab studies the innate and adaptive immune response to infection and cancer. The Lieberman laboratory identified the mechanism behind inflammatory death (pyroptosis) triggered by pathogens and intracellular danger and identified important roles for pyroptosis in anti-tumor immunity, sepsis, SARS-CoV-2, Yersinia, and Group A streptococcal infection, and neurodegeneration. She was the first to describe CD8 T cell exhaustion in humans (the basis for current checkpoint blockade therapies) and to do clinical studies of antigen-specific T cell immunotherapy. She is currently studying how tumors evade immune elimination and how innate immunity contributes to immune control of cancer. Her laboratory has been in the forefront of developing RNAi-based therapeutics and using RNAi for genome-wide screening. They were the first to show that siRNAs could be used to treat disease in vivo and to develop cell-targeted RNAs that knockdown gene expression in vivo in immune cells and cancer. Dr. Lieberman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the AACR Academy and is a recipient of the 2022 William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology.

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