Arlene Sharpe

Arlene Sharpe is the George Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology and Chair of the Department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. She is a member of the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an Institute Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Leader of the Cancer Immunology Program at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, and Co-Director of the Evergrande Center for Immunologic Diseases at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Dr. Sharpe earned her AB from Harvard University and her MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School. She completed residency training in Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is board certified in Anatomic Pathology. Dr. Sharpe has served as a member and chair of the NIH Hypersensitivity, Autoimmunity and Immune-mediated diseases (HAI) study section and as a member of the NIAID Council. She also served as President of the American Association of Immunologists from 2016-2017.

Dr. Sharpe is a leader in the field of T cell costimulation. Her laboratory has discovered and elucidated functions of T cell costimulatory pathways, including the immunoinhibitory functions of the CTLA-4 and PD-1 pathways, which are targets for cancer immunotherapy. Her laboratory currently investigates roles of T cell costimulatory pathways in cancer, autoimmunity, and infection. Dr. Sharpe has published over 300 papers and was listed by Thomas Reuters as one of the most Highly Cited Researchers (top 1%) in 2014-2018 and a 2016 Citation Laureate. She received the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor immunology in 2014 and the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize in 2017 for her contributions to the discovery of PD-1 pathway. Dr. Sharpe is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.