Chief Medical and Science Officer and Senior Vice President of Global Infectious Diseases Research
Henry M. Jackson Foundation (HJF) for the Advancement of Military Medicine
USA
Sandhya Vasan, MD, is the Chief Medical and Science Officer at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine (HJF). She also serves as Senior Vice President of HJF’s Global Infectious Diseases portfolio, leading a longstanding collaboration with the U.S. Military HIV Research Program at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR).
She earned her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her MD through the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard Medical School.
She provides strategic scientific leadership for HJF’s partnership with WRAIR to support HIV and other infectious diseases research, including a global network of multidisciplinary teams working to advance basic, translational and clinical research on vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and HIV remission strategies.
Earlier in her career, she studied HIV vaccines and adjuvants at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and The Rockefeller University. She also spent seven years in Bangkok, Thailand, where she conducted clinical trials of therapeutic interventions and preventive vaccines at the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences.
She serves on several external scientific advisory boards and data safety monitoring boards. She also serves on boards of directors, including for the Good Participatory Practices Advisory Committee for the Coalition to Accelerate and Support Prevention Research at the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC). She is co-PI for the Immunotherapy for Cure, a Martin Delany Collaboratory funded by the National Institutes of Health.