Mai  Dang, MD, PhD

Mai Dang, MD, PhD

Assistant Professor of Child Neurology
Washington University School of Medicine

Mai Dang, MD, PhD, is an assistant professor of child neurology. She received her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago and completed her medical and graduate education at the University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana. Her residency and clinical and research fellowship training were completed at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania).

She joined the faculty of the Department of Neurology at Washington University in 2021. Her clinical specialty is the neurologic complications of cancer and its treatment.

Dang’s research work is focused on defining the functional heterogeneity of microglia and macrophages in pediatric brain tumors. Using a wide variety of tools including immunocompetent brain tumor animal models, single-cell analysis, and advanced imaging, her lab is interrogating the multiplicity of the anti- and pro-tumor functions of these myeloid cells. The aims of her investigations are 1) to leverage the myeloid cells’ direct and indirect contributions to tumor cell killing during treatments such as radiation and molecular-targeted inhibitors to improve treatment efficacy; and 2) to understand how intratumoral microglia interact with the surrounding normal brain during tumor development, treatment, and recovery after treatment.