Sarah Cooley MD

Dr. Cooley received bachelor’s degrees in biology and chemistry from Cornell University in 1994.  She spent two years working for the American Red Cross National HLA Reference Laboratory in Rockville, Maryland before attending medical school at the University of Minnesota.  Her internal medicine residency was completed at the University of California, San Francisco in 2003, when she returned to Minnesota for the fellowship program in Hematology, Oncology and Transplantation. 

While in medical school Dr. Cooley worked with Dr. Jeffrey Miller to study the role of natural killer (NK) cell-mediated antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity against breast cancer targets.  As a fellow she again worked with Dr. Miller to investigate the regulation and role of NK killer immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIR), especially in the post-hematopoietic cell transplantation setting.  In Fall 2006 she became an Assistant Professor in the Division of Hematology, Oncology and Transplantation.  She hopes to expand her research into pre-clinical and clinical studies to develop new immunotherapy strategies to treat cancer.

Selected Publications
Cooley S, McCullar V, Wangen R, Bergemann TL, Spellman S, Weisdorf DJ, Miller JS.  KIR reconstitution is altered by T cells in the graft and correlates with clinical outcomes after unrelated donor transplantation.  Blood 2005; 106:4370-4376.