Kira Bona, MD, MPH

Dr. Bona is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and an attending Pediatric Oncologist at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. Dr. Bona received her MD from the Yale University School of Medicine, and her MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health with a focus on clinical effectiveness. She completed her pediatrics residency at Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center and her pediatric hematology/oncology subspecialty fellowship training at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Boston Children’s Hospital. She was a research fellow under the mentorship of Dr. Joanne Wolfe at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s and Dr. Smita Bhatia at University Alabama Birmingham.

Dr. Bona joined the faculty at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s as a pediatric oncologist in July 2012. In addition to her clinical role treating children with leukemia and lymphoma, Dr. Bona is an NIH and foundation-funded physician-scientist with research focused on identifying poverty-associated disparities in relapse and survival for children with cancer treated on clinical trials in the US, and developing interventions to ameliorate these disparities. Her research program aims to improve survival and patient-reported outcomes in pediatric cancer by systematically considering social determinants of health as independent risk factors for outcome and integrating them into the existing robust clinical trial and basic science models of discovery and care in pediatric cancer. 

Her current research includes (1) the first prospective trial-embedded investigations of poverty and outcome in pediatric oncology in both the Dana-Farber ALL Consortium and the Children’s Oncology Group; (2) development of novel health equity interventions targeting poverty-exposures designed to scale across multi-center clinical trials; and (3) collaborative translational investigation of poverty-associated treatment resistance.

Dr. Bona has been the recipient of several past awards and honors including a Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, a St. Baldrick’s Fellow grant from St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a Junior Faculty Career Development Award from the National Palliative Care Research Center, and annual teaching awards from the Boston Combined Residency Program since 2018.