Vinod P. Balachandran, MD, completed his undergraduate work in Physics at Cornell University, his MD at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, general surgery residency at Weill Cornell’s New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and fellowship training in surgical oncology at MSK. In 2015, Dr. Balachandran joined MSK as faculty, where he is now an Assistant Member of the Immuno-Oncology Service of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program (HOPP), an Assistant Attending Hepatopancreatobiliary Surgeon in the Department of Surgery, and Member of the Rubenstein Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research. His clinical and laboratory focus is to discover new immunotherapies for pancreatic cancer. His approach is to study a highly rare subgroup of pancreatic cancer patients that, remarkably, survive long-term. His aim is to discover the underlying immunological principles at play in these patients, and to translate these principles into new clinical immunotherapies.

For his work, Vinod has received the Louise and Allston Boyer Young Investigator Award for Cancer Research, the Pershing Square Sohn Prize for Young Investigators, a Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Award, a National Cancer Institute Cancer Moonshot Award, and a Stand Up to Cancer Phillip A. Sharp Innovation Award.