Sara Buhrlage

Sara Buhrlage, PhD, is a Research Professor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Harvard Medical School (HMS), where she has been on faculty since 2015. She holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Michigan (2008) and completed postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute before joining DFCI's Medicinal Chemistry Core in 2010.

Research: Her lab focuses on interrogating deubiquitinase (DUB) biology to identify therapeutic targets and develop small-molecule ligands for clinical applications. This work integrates DUB-targeted libraries, chemoproteomic assays, medicinal chemistry, structural biology, and computational chemistry to advance drug discovery.

Affiliations: Her positions bridge DFCI’s research mission and HMS’s academic programs, emphasizing translational cancer research. Her lab, the Buhrlage Lab for Cancer Chemical Biology, operates under the Cancer Biology department at DFCI.

Education:

• PhD in Chemistry, University of Michigan, 2008
• Postdoctoral Fellowship, Broad Institute