Timothy P. Padera

Dr. Padera earned dual Bachelor’s Degrees in Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University. He earned his PhD in Medical Engineering from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program and performed his thesis work at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Padera is Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School and a Principal Investigator in the Edwin L. Steele Laboratories, Department of Radiation Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Padera is also a Member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Faculty. He earned an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award in 2011 and was named the Rullo Family MGH Research Scholar 2021. He served on the National Commission on Lymphatic Diseases. Dr. Padera is recognized as a leader in the field of functional lymphatic imaging, particularly with respect to lymphatic vessel pumping, lymphatic metastasis and lymph node imaging. He has seminal papers describing the role of functional peritumor lymphatic vessels in tumor dissemination and showing lymph node metastasis can spread to distant organs. His group has also developed a novel method to study the autonomous contraction of collecting lymphatic vessels in mice. This work opened the door to the wide array of genetic mouse models to study underlying functional lymphatic deficits in lymphedema, states of inflammation, aging and bacterial infection.

Title: Lymphatic system function in aging and cancer progression