Barbara Bierer


Barbara Bierer is senior vice president for research at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Bierer completed her internal medicine residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital and her hematology and medical oncology training at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Bierer maintained a research laboratory in the Department of Pediatric Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and was appointed director of pediatric stem cell transplantation at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital in 1993. In 1997, she was named chief of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Biology at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She served on the Scholars Committee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and on the Admissions Committee of the Biomedical Research Training Program for Underrepresented Minorities at NHLBI, where she received the Director's Award in 1999. She returned to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in July 2002 as vice president of patient safety and director of the Center for Patient Safety. In 2003, Dr. Bierer moved to the Brigham and Women's Hospital to assume her current position. In 2006, she established the Center for Faculty Development and Diversity at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and now serves as its first director.

Dr. Bierer's laboratory research interests include mechanisms of T cell activation and of immunosuppression, interests that complement her clinical commitment to hematology. In addition to her academic responsibilities, Dr. Bierer was elected to the Board of Directors of the Association for Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AAHRPP), serving as its President from 2003 to 2007 and was on the Board of Directors of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). She was a member of the Medical and Scientific Advisory Board and, later, the Board of Directors of ViaCell. She serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals including Current Protocols of Immunology, Journal of Immunology, and Blood. She is currently a member of the AAMC-AAU Advisory Committee on Financial Conflicts of Interest in Clinical Research and on the National Academies of Sciences Committee on Science, Technology and the Law.