Jennifer A. Kanakry, M.D.

Dr. Jennifer Kanakry is an Associate Research Physician at the Center for Cancer Research of the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Kanakry received her B.A. (2002) from Pomona College in Claremont, California, where she studied cognitive neuropsychology and biology. She then worked at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland as an Intramural Research Training Award Fellow under Dr. Ellen Leibenluft within the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program of the National Institute of Mental Health. She then went on to receive her medical degree (2007) from a joint program between Dartmouth College School of Medicine (Hanover, NH) and Brown University School of Medicine (Providence, RI). She completed both her residency training in Internal Medicine (2007-2010) and fellowship training (2010-2013) in Hematology at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Her clinical research during fellowship was focused on virus-associated cancers, immunodeficiency associated lymphomas, and allogeneic bone marrow transplantation under the mentorship of Dr. Richard Ambinder. In 2013, she joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins within the Departments of Medicine and Oncology, where she primarily focused on treating patients with diseases that more commonly occur in the setting of immunodeficiency, including lymphoma, disorders of immune dysregulation, and virus-associated lymphoproliferative disorders. She continued her research on Epstein-Barr virus and Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus related cancers, investigating biomarkers for these diseases and carrying out clinical trials for patients with these cancers. In 2015, she joined the Experimental Transplantation and Immunology Branch of the National Cancer Institute, where she continues to focus on diseases related to immunodeficiency and the role of allogeneic bone marrow transplantation and other adoptive immunotherapies.