Assistant Professor
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Ai-ris Yonekura Collier, MD is a physician-scientist specializing in high-risk pregnancy care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School. The goal of her translational research is to characterize the maternal cellular immune phenotype in pregnancy disorders like preeclampsia and fetal growth restriction and in the setting of infectious diseases like Zika virus or SARS-CoV-2. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was the Principal Investigator leading the hospital-wide COVID-19 Biorepository and a co-investigator for the Ad26.COV2.S COVID-19 vaccine booster trial. This work builds upon prior work performing longitudinal observational studies in pregnant individuals exposed or infected with the Zika virus and creating large clinical biospecimen repositories for translational immunologic studies in pregnancy. As the Co-Director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research Clinical Trials Unit, she is an enthusiastic educator and advocate for inclusion of pregnant and lactating individuals in observational and interventional clinical trials.
Dr. Collier obtained her M.D. through the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard Medical School where she spent time in the lab of Dr. Shannon Turley, evaluating a novel mechanism of cellular immune tolerance induction by lymph node stroma cells. She is using her background in immune tolerance to study the mechanisms of maternal immune tolerance to the fetus in placenta in healthy and complicated pregnancies. As a Maternal-Fetal Medicine clinician, she represents a cross-disciplinary collaboration between the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research.
Emerging virology/vaccine in pregnancy
Saturday, February 10, 2024
9:00 AM – 9:25 AM
Saturday, February 10, 2024
9:45 AM – 10:00 AM