Biography
Sandhya Vasan, M.D., is the Director of the HJF Component of the U.S. Military HIV Research Program and the Emerging Infectious Disease Branch at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Dr. Vasan obtained her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before completing her M.D. 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 at the Communicable Disease Centre and National University of Singapore. From 2002-2011, Dr. Vasan conducted clinical and animal studies of HIV vaccines and adjuvants at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and the Rockefeller University.
Dr. Vasan joined MHRP in 2011 and spent seven years at the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences (AFRIMS) in Bangkok, Thailand, conducting clinical trials of therapeutic interventions and preventive vaccines while establishing and leading a nonhuman primate research laboratory. She later served as MHRP’s Associate Director for HIV Vaccine Research.
She is the Principal Investigator on HJF’s cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense and provides key leadership for MHRP and EIDB’s wide array of basic and clinical studies including research on COVID-19 vaccines and monoclonal antibodies.
She serves on external Scientific Advisory Boards, Data Safety Monitoring Boards, the Board of Directors for CAMRIS International, LLC and on the Good Participatory Practices Advisory Committee for the Coalition to Accelerate and Support Prevention Research (CASPR) at the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC) . She is Co-PI for the Immunotherapy for Cure (I4C), a Martin Delany Collaboratory funded by the NIH.