Sareh Parangi, MD
Dr. Parangi is a Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School in Boston and a busy endocrine surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). She currently serves as Chair of Surgery at Newton Wellesley Hospital. She has interest and expertise in thyroid and parathyroid tumors. She focuses her clinical efforts on endocrine surgery and applies her basic science knowledge and expertise to tumor progression in thyroid cancer. She has repeatedly been one of the Boston surgeons named in Best of Boston in Boston Magazine and her excellence in both research and her clinical expertise have earned her a national reputation.
Dr. Parangi graduated from Barnard College and earned her medical degree from Columbia University. She completed her residency at UCSF during which time she completed a Fellowship in Molecular Medicine. She is one of a handful of thyroid surgeons with expertise in molecular biology and has over 100 publications, many on thyroid cancer therapeutics in premier journal. She serves as the Director of Diversity and Inclusion in the MGH Department of Surgery. She is a Past President of The Association of Women Surgeons (AWS) and has in the past served as Treasurer of the most prestigious organization of endocrine surgeons in the US, The American Association of Endocrine Surgeons (AAES). She is also Secretary of the International Thyroid Oncology Group and a member of both the American Thyroid Association and American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. She has won numerous awards nationally and at Harvard Medical School for her NIH funded research. Her active research focuses on understanding why some patients with thyroid cancer do worse than others and how to help them. This important research effort focuses on clarifying the molecular mechanism of thyroid cancer invasion and understanding the process of disease progression in patients with thyroid cancer. Her current projects focus on understanding the role of the immune system in the tumor microenvironment and how immunotherapy can be utilized to treat aggressive thyroid cancers such as anaplastic thyroid cancer.
Dr. Parangi has worked successfully with industry partners to bring novel drugs for thyroid cancer to clinical trials. She is active in many organizations that promote gender equity and diversity in surgery and medicine because she feels there is still a large need in promoting women to leadership positions in academia and surgical organizations. She believes that although promotion of women in surgical subspecialties has been slow which is obvious to her given her personal story on becoming the 2nd ever female Professor of Surgery at MGH, now is the time to institute bigger systematic changes that will ensure the best and the brightest get attracted to and succeed in surgery.