Associate Professor
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Kira Bona, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an Attending Pediatric Oncologist at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. Dr. Bona is an NIH and foundation-funded physician-scientist with a research lab focused on poverty-associated disparities in relapse and survival for children with cancer treated on clinical trials in the US. She has formal training in health services and outcomes research, and clinical expertise in pediatric leukemia and lymphoma. Her research program aims to improve survival in pediatric cancer by systematically considering social determinants of health as risk factors for poor outcome and integrating them into the existing robust clinical trial and basic science models of discovery and care in pediatric cancer.
Her work to date has demonstrated that poverty is associated with higher rates of relapse, lower overall survival and inferior psychosocial outcomes for pediatric cancer patients treated on multi-center clinical trials. Her current research funded by the NCI and American Cancer Society includes (1) the first prospective trial-embedded investigations of poverty and outcome in both the Dana-Farber ALL Consortium and the Children’s Oncology Group; (2) development of novel health equity interventions targeting poverty-exposures designed to scale across multi-center clinical trials; and (3) collaborative translational investigation of poverty-associated treatment resistance.
Dr. Bona has been the recipient of several past awards and honors including a Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, a St. Baldrick’s Fellow grant from St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a Junior Faculty Career Development Award from the National Palliative Care Research Center, and annual teaching awards from the Boston Combined Residency Program since 2018.
Friday, March 6, 2026
2:50pm - 3:10pm PST
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose