Tamara C. Pozos ’89 is a national leader, clinician, and scholar in pediatric clinical immunology, caring for children with life-long inborn errors of immunity and children whose immune systems have been secondarily weakened by medical therapies.
After graduating from Carleton as a biology major, Pozos earned an MD and PhD from the Stanford University School of Medicine. She completed residency training in pediatrics at the University of California–San Francisco and pediatric infectious diseases fellowship training at University of Washington/Seattle Children’s Hospital. Her basic research focused on immune cell signaling and the interaction of the developing immune system with infectious pathogens.
In 2008, she joined the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Division at Children’s Minnesota to develop a clinical immunology program. Since 2019, as medical director, she leads the only full-time pediatric clinical immunology program in the region.
Throughout her career, Pozos has successfully collaborated with pediatric specialty clinicians and basic scientists to understand mechanisms of immunologic diseases and to develop new treatments. During the heights of the COVID-19 pandemic, her team was an important part of developing local protocols to treat multisystem inflammatory syndrome of children (MIS-C), as the majority of the affected children in the area were referred to Children’s Minnesota.
Pozos is influential in the broader field of clinical immunology by publishing manuscripts and being actively involved in the Clinical Immunology Society, where she has presented at annual meetings since 2011. She is a reviewer for the Journal of Clinical Immunology as well as multiple other journals. She participates in national protocol development, including the Newborn Screening for SCID document for the Clinical & Laboratory Standards Institute. While Children’s Minnesota is a free-standing hospital and not formally associated with the University of Minnesota, she is also committed to teaching clinical immunology and is recognized as an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics by the University of Minnesota.
Pozos has been recognized on Minnesota Monthly’s “Best Doctors” list since 2014 and on Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine’s “Top Doctors” list since 2016. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, Jesús Cabrera.