Dr. Sandhya Vasan will be relocating to the United States in July to become MHRP's Associate Director for HIV Vaccine Research, a new position within the program.
From 2011 – 2018, Dr. Vasan worked for MHRP in the Department of Retrovirology of the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences (AFRIMS) in Bangkok, Thailand to conduct preventative vaccine trials in follow-up to the Phase 3 RV144 HIV vaccine clinical trial. She is also Head of the Nonhuman Primate Laboratory to develop animal models to understand the mechanism of action of these vaccines and pursue novel HIV prevention strategies.
Dr. Vasan obtained her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before completing her MD at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard Medical School. After a residency in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University, she worked as a Henry Luce Foundation Fellow at the Communicable Disease Centre in Singapore. From 2002-2011, Dr. Vasan conducted Phase 1 clinical trials of HIV vaccines and adjuvants and related immunology research at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and the Rockefeller University.