Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Dr. Sarah Hill, M.D./Ph.D., is a physician scientist in the Department of Medical Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She completed her A.B. at Harvard College, her Ph.D. at Harvard University in the laboratory of Dr. David Livingston at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and her M.D. at Harvard Medical School in the Harvard-MIT HST program. She is also a Rhodes Scholar and completed an M.Sc. in biochemistry at Oxford University. Upon graduation from the Harvard M.D./Ph.D. program, she completed a brief clinical residency. She joined the faculty at Dana-Farber as an independent investigator immediately upon completion of her residency without any post-doctoral training and won an NIH Early Independence Award with the support of her Ph.D. mentor.

The Hill lab is part of the Department of Medical Oncology and Division of Molecular and Cellular Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The mission of the Hill Lab is to develop a deep mechanistic understanding of ovarian cancer development and progression which we will harness to make ovarian cancer a more manageable disease for all patients through the development of effective methods of early detection, more personalized treatment, and better therapeutic strategies. In pursuit of this mission, the Hill lab focuses on understanding the role of the DNA damage response in ovarian carcinogenesis, tumor evolution, the anti-tumor immune response, and therapeutic sensitivity and resistance. We utilize molecular and cellular biology, immunology, sequencing, and imaging techniques in ovarian cancer cell lines, patient-derived normal and ovarian cancer organoids, and ovarian cancer mouse models.