Nancy J. Sullivan, ScD

Biography

Dr. Nancy Sullivan is the Associate Director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) at Boston University. She assumed the role in December of 2022, a pivotal time of heightened global awareness of the threats posed by emerging infectious diseases. While building on its outstanding record of research, she intends to steer NEIDL into the space where basic scientific discovery, translational research, pandemic preparedness, and global engagement meet.

An internationally respected leader in viral immunology, emerging diseases prevention, and infectious disease research, Dr. Sullivan previously served as chief of the Biodefense Research Section at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) in the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID). She was a member of the NIAID’s Pandemic Preparedness Working Group where she proposed the protoptype pathogen approach to vaccine development [i] that is now in widespread use by national and international organizations. Dr. Sullivan was also deeply involved in the US response to COVID-19. During the pandemic, she coauthored close to 40 COVID-related research papers, covering topics as diverse as vaccine and therapeutics development and tracking of SARS-CoV-2 variant resistance to neutralization.

Beyond her work on COVID-19, Dr. Sullivan has a long-standing commitment to the study of emerging pathogens with pandemic potential including, mpox, Nipah, Ebola, Marburg, and other high consequence viruses. The global importance of her work became dramatically clear in the spring of 2014 with the multi-country outbreak of the deadly Ebola disease in West Africa. Based on years of prior research developing gene-based approaches to Ebola vaccines, Dr. Sullivan and her team were first to demonstrate vaccine protection against Ebola infection in primates, leading to development of the ChAd3-Ebola vaccine that was deployed for efficacy testing during the 2013-2016 outbreak.

Dr. Sullivan has received numerous citations for these achievements. She was named among “The Ebola Fighters” whom Time magazine awarded its Person of the Year in 2014; and in 2015, she was included in Politico’s Top 50, again for her work on Ebola. She has also received multiple NIH Director’s Awards, NIH Staff Recognition Awards, and NIAID Merit Awards, and she was a Service Service to America Medals finalist.

Modeling the role in public life she expects the NEIDL to play, Dr. Sullivan has taken her fight against emerging infectious diseases (EID) well outside her own lab. Her team developed vaccines against Marburg and Sudan viruses that have advanced to Phase I/II human clinical trials and are currently being developed by the Sabin Vaccines Institute. She also formed partnerships in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and led the discovery from a DRC Ebola survivor of a potently protective therapeutic monoclonal antibody, mAb114, that is effective in saving the lives of nearly 90% of Ebola patients who are treated soon after they contract the disease. In December of 2020, mAb114, became the NIH Vaccine Research Center’s first FDA-approved clinical product, and it is now marketed as Ebanga.

Alongside these scientific breakthroughs, Dr. Sullivan founded a scientific research and capacity building training program that is preparing scientists in the DRC to develop and fund their own independent, regionally appropriate research programs. By several years, this work anticipated global efforts of organizations like the WHO to decentralize and, at the same time, coordinate EID research.

Dr. Sullivan is a native of the Boston area. She earned her undergraduate degree at Merrimack College and doctorate at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. In 2023, Boston University appointed her the Edward Avedisian Professor and Professor of Virology, Immunology & Microbiology at the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Professor of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences.