John W. Eckman Professor of Medical Science
University of Pennsylvania
Sara Cherry is the John W. Eckman Professor of Medical Science in the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her undergraduate degree in Chemistry from UC Berkely working with Dr. Peter Schultz, and her PhD in Biology from MIT under the guidance of Dr. David Baltimore. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Norbert Perrimon at Harvard Medical School, Genetics. She was then recruited to the University of Pennsylvania and has since established the High-Throughput Screening Core, became the Director of High-throughput Institute for Discovery, and is leading the RNA Therapeutics Group at the Institute for RNA Innovation. Sara’s research focuses on the interface between viruses and hosts. She has pioneered the use of high-throughput cell-based screening to study a viral infections focusing in emerging RNA viruses. This includes arthropod borne viruses such as dengue and west nile virus, and more recently respiratory viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and influenza. Her lab has discovered host proteins that promote infection and innate immune mechanisms by which cells sense and respond to infection. In addition to identifying cellular factors involved in infection, her lab is using high-throughput screening to identify antivirals active against these diverse RNA viruses. Recently, the Cherry lab has extended their studies to precision medicine and oncology and has developed a pipeline to test patient tumor cells for sensitivities to chemotherapeutics in an effort to personalize treatments.
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