Alumni Spotlight: Pia Banerjee, ’05

Pia Banerjee ’05 traces her path into health care to eighth grade, when the loss of a friend to brain cancer first sparked her curiosity about the disease and how it affects families. Today, she is the inaugural director of cancer innovation and transformation at the American Cancer Society (ACS), which supports over 110 million patients and caregivers each year. Amid seismic shifts in how care is delivered and accessed, she leads initiatives to use technology to improve care and make it more equitable.

“Our goal is clear: to transform the cancer experience from fragmented and burdensome to equitable, connected, and personalized,” says Banerjee, who earned a biology degree from MIT and a PhD in psychology from Washington University in St. Louis before completing a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical neuropsychology at UCLA.

Working with patients and caregivers as a postdoc gave her a close-up view of how overwhelmed patients felt trying to coordinate complex care. Hoping to provide better support, Banerjee created her first digital health tool: a system designed to flag psychosocial and cognitive difficulties such as memory loss and prompt follow-up from the oncology team.

She then joined St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as a researcher and clinician, helping lead studies on the long-term impacts of cancer treatment in children. Her work resulted in several high-impact publications and changes to clinical care guidelines.

Then the covid-19 pandemic hit, and as telehealth programs and remote patient monitoring soared, she reached a turning point. “I saw how moments of disruption can spark solutions that transform care in lasting ways,” she says.

Seeing the potential for personalized care from home, Banerjee next served as senior VP and founding clinical executive of Neuroglee Therapeutics, where she led the development of digital health solutions and a telehealth clinic. She then founded Synapse Health Partners in 2023 to help organizations create and adopt transformative health tech solutions.

In 2024, she joined the ACS, where her initiatives include an app for patients and caregivers to enhance quality of life and confidence in living with cancer, a unified data ecosystem, and an AI-facilitated service to match and navigate patients to clinical trials.

“MIT taught me to think across boundaries, with a curiosity and boldness that truly defines MIT,” Banerjee says. “That mindset drives me toward creating a future where every person with cancer can have more and better days.”