Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, is the Mount Sinai Chair professor in Cancer Immunology and the Director of the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Dr. Merad also co-Directs, the Cancer Immunology program at The Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Institute and is the Director of the Mount Sinai Human Immune Monitoring Center (HIMC).

Dr. Merad’s research over the past 20 years has focused on understanding the mechanisms that control the development and functional identity of tissue resident dendritic cells and macrophages during homeostasis, and examining how these regulations are changed in cancer and inflammatory diseases. The overarching goal of her laboratory is to identify dysregulated pathways in macrophages and dendritic cells that can be harnessed to treat Cancer and Inflammatory diseases using both genetically engineered mouse models and human lesions to address these questions. To expand the understanding of immune cells contribution to human lesions, she founded in 2009, the human immune monitoring center at Mount Sinai to implement technology platforms to maximize information obtained from limited biological samples. In 2016, she has taken the leadership of the Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine (PrIISM) to continue to lead initiatives to enhance human immunology science. PrIISM integrates immunological research programs with synergistic expertise in biology, medicine, technology, physics, mathematics and computational biology which come together to frame novel questions to understand the contribution of immune cells to disease initiation, progression and response to treatment, to implement cutting edge technologies and to develop novel immunotherapy strategies for the treatment of human diseases.  

Dr. Merad has authored more than 180 primary papers and reviews in high profile journals. She receives generous funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her research on innate immunity and their contribution to human disease, and belongs to several NIH consortia. She is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the recipient of the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology.