Susanna Cunningham-Rundles, Ph.D. is Research Professor of Immunology in Pediatrics, Vice Chair for Academic Affairs and Director of the Weill-Cornell Cellular Immunology Laboratory.

Dr. Cunningham- Rundles received her PhD in Microbiology (Biochemical Genetics) from New York University in 1974 and a Founders Day Award for outstanding scholarship. She was a Predoctoral NIH Fellow in Genetics, Department of Microbiology, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY (1970-1973) and a Postdoctoral NIH Fellow in Genetics, Department of Microbiology, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY (1974) and then a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Immunobiology Program, at Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, New York, NY (1974-1976). Her subsequent research at Memorial Sloan Kettering included the development of new approaches for the study of human immune response as Head, Clinical Cellular Immunology Laboratory and then as Assistant Director of the Blood Bank. Her laboratory was the first to define the cellular immune deficiency caused by an emerging new virus, HIV-1. She was recruited to Cornell in Pediatric Hematology/ Oncology (1986) where she led studies on transfusion related HIV infection in hemophilia and congenital HIV and the role of micronutrients including iron and zinc as co-factors in immune response.

Dr. Cunningham-Rundles served as Associate Program Director, Children's Clinical Research Center, Cornell University Medical College, New York from 1998- 2004, Director, of Children's Blood Foundation Laboratories during the building and establishment of the labs from 2001-2004, and Director of the Immunology Core Laboratory for The Clinical Research Nutrition Unit, an NIH funded consortium from 1990 to 2007. She has been PI and Program Director of the NIH NCI Program for Nutrition and Cancer Prevention since 2009.