Dr. Pai is an Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Director of Translational Research of Head and Neck Cancer at the MGH Cancer Center, Core Member of the Center of Systems Biology (CSB) at the MGH, Member of the Cancer Immunology Program at the Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center (DFHCC), and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from Dartmouth College with a major in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. After graduating from Dartmouth, she completed the MD/Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in which she obtained her Ph.D. training in cancer immunology and vaccines. After medical school, she completed her otolaryngology-head and neck surgery residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She also trained in designing and conducting clinical trials at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has sought an academic career combining her immunology and clinical trials background with head and neck surgical oncology interests. Her research interests focus on better understanding how human papillomavirus (HPV) evades the immune system and strategies that can be applied to reactivate the host immune response against HPV-associated tumors through vaccines and immune modulatory drugs. She leads several investigator-initiated immunotherapy clinical trials and has a research laboratory continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and industry since 2007. She serves on national and international grant and strategic review panels and the advisory boards for several pharmaceutical companies.