Dr Filipina (Pina) Amosa-Lei Sam
Pina is blessed to be a wife and mother to her three children. She was a Samoan-based pathologist and the Head of School of the National University of Samoa School of Medicine, prior to taking professional development leave to pursue a PhD at the University of Otago.
She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Pathology, Dunedin School of Medicine. Her research interests are in the pathogenesis of cancers, looking at molecular and cellular events that are involved in carcinogenesis. Her present work focusses on cervical cancer, looking at the association of putative prognostic markers including Blimp-1 (transcription repressor) and cervical lesion persistence, regression or progression to cancer. She is also working on further characterization of prognostic markers of interest in high-risk Human papillomavirus (hr-HPV) infected individuals with cervical lesions to predict cervical disease progression in hrHPV-infected people.