Dr. Colson is the Chief for the Division of Thoracic Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In addition to her cardiothoracic surgical training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, her academic training includes a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an M.D. from Mayo Medical School, and a Ph.D. and general surgery residency at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the recipient of the George H.A. Clowes, Jr. Research Career Development Award from the American College of Surgeons, the Edward M. Kennedy Award for Health Care Innovation from CIMIT, an Officer and Exam Chair for the American Board of Thoracic Surgery and was Co-chair of the 2015 American Association for Thoracic Surgery Annual Meeting. She has a specific clinical interest in increasing and improving the identification and treatment of lung cancer in the operating room for lung cancer treatment, and in understanding the unique differences of lung cancer in women.

She is co-inventor on three awarded patents and has received over twenty foundation grants and seven R29/R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institute. Dr. Colson's research focuses on the development of unique mechanisms of polymer and nanoparticle drug delivery aimed at preventing cancer recurrence, and the investigation of novel methods to identify hidden tumor that has spread to nearby lymph nodes. She has over 135 peer-reviewed publications highlighting her previous work in transplantation and her most recent investigations in sentinel lymph nodes in lung cancer and polymer-mediated drug delivery.