She received her MD-PhD from Baylor College of Medicine and completed her residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of Texas at Southwestern before coming to Johns Hopkins in 1998 for a fellowship in Medical Oncology and Hematology. Dr. Emens specializes in cancer immunotherapy, and her research focuses on the development and implementation of breast cancer immunotherapies (including vaccination strategies and immune checkpoint blockade) in combination with traditional anticancer therapies and newer biologically targeted therapies. She is a member of the FDA Advisory Committee on Cell, Tissue, and Gene Therapies, and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Cancer Research, and the Journal for the Immunotherapy of Cancer.