Michael J. Lenardo, M.D.

Section Chief, NIAID, NIH
Founder and Director (2001-2011)
NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program

Dr. Michael Lenardo was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 1, 1955. He attended the Johns Hopkins University and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Natural Sciences in 1977. He obtained his Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) from Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. in 1981. He carried out clinical and research training at the University of Iowa from 1981-1985. He was then a Research Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an adjunct appointment at Harvard Medical School. During this time, he carried out molecular biology research under the mentorship of Nobel laureates David Baltimore and Philip Sharp.

Dr. Lenardo has been Section Chief in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1989 to the present, directing research on T-lymphocyte regulation, HIV-1, and genetic diseases of the immune system using advanced genomic technologies. In 2014, he was appointed Director of the Clinical Genomics Program of NIAID. He has served on the editorial boards for the European Journal of Immunology, the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Science magazine, and Biology Direct. He is an Adjunct Professor of Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. Also, he directs cooperative research agreements on novel therapies for immunological disease with Merck, Novartis, and Regeneron pharmaceuticals. He is currently Director of the Clinical Genomics program.

Dr. Lenardo has founded or co-founded several joint research programs including the NIH-Oxford- Cambridge Biomedical Research Scholars, the NIH-University of Pennsylvania Immunology Program, the NIH-Marshall Scholars, the NIH-Rhodes Scholars, the National M.D./Ph.D. partnership program, and the NIH-Institute Pasteur Infectious Disease and Immunology Program. Dr. Lenardo has published over 200 scholarly works and holds a number of medical patents. Among his honors and awards, he is Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.), conferred by Queen Elizabeth II, March, 2006 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Medicine.