Dr. Ligia Pinto is the director of the Vaccine, Immunity and Cancer Directorate at Frederick National Laboratory. Pinto completed her Ph.D. in 1995 at the Experimental Immunology Branch, National Institutes of Health, after several years of research on cellular immunology of HIV infection at the University of Lisbon, School of Medicine in Portugal. She continued her postdoctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health where she focused on investigating immunological alterations induced by HIV, HIV vaccine candidates and host protective immune responses controlling HIV replication and associated pathogenesis. In 2001, she joined the Frederick National Laboratory to establish the HPV Immunology Laboratory. The work from her Laboratory has played a critical role in the understanding of the systemic and mucosal immune responses induced by the licensed HPV vaccines in clinical trials and promoted the development of an International HPV Serology Standardization Initiative. She has worked in the area of immunology of infectious diseases and vaccines for the last 30 years, with over 120 peer-reviewed publications.
