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 Medical School. Her lab studies the innate and adaptive immune response to infection and cancer, especially the molecular pathways used by killer lymphocytes to induce programmed cell death of both mammalian cells and microbes and the mechanisms responsible for inflammatory death (pyroptosis) triggered by innate immune recognition of invasive pathogens and danger signals. Recent work identified roles for pyroptosis in SARS-CoV-2, Yersinia, and Group A streptococcal infections, in immune control of cancer and in neurodegeneration. Her lab was also in the forefront of developing RNAi-based therapeutics, using RNAi for genome-wide screening and studying the role of microRNAs in cancer.
She graduated from Radcliffe College, Harvard, received a PhD in theoretical physics at Rockefeller and an MD in the joint Harvard MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. She worked as a theoretical high energy physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at Fermilab. She was a postdoc with Herman Eisen in immunology at MIT and worked as a hematologist/oncologist at New England Medical Center. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.