Cammie Lesser, M.D., Ph.D., is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a research scholar and infectious diseases attending at Massachusetts General Hospital. She received her M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, San Francisco and completed an internal medical residency, infectious disease fellowship and postdoctoral training at the University of Washington, Seattle. 

Lesser is the Associate Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for the Study of Bacterial Pathogenesis, as well as the Harvard Medical School Infectious Disease and Basic Microbiological Mechanisms T32 training program. Research in her lab studies host-pathogen interactions, focusing on type III secretion systems. Projects in her lab focus on understanding how type III secreted proteins are defined as substrates, deciphering how they act to manipulate eukaryotic host cell processes and, most recently, engineering these secretion systems to develop engineered Escherichia coli as a therapeutic protein delivery platform. 

Lesser is a member of the Editorial Boards of Infection & Immunity, Current Opinions in Microbiology and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal and will be Co-Editor in Chief of Current Opinions in Microbiology starting in 2025. She recently completed a term as a standing member of the National Institute of Health’s Bacterial Pathogenesis (BACP) study section.

She is the recipient of multiple awards, including election to the American Academy of Microbiology and 2 National Institute of Health Director Awards, a Transformative Research Award and an Extraordinary, Unconventional Research Knowledge Acceleration (EUREKA) award.