Leadership Team

Vijay Kuchroo Ph.D., D.V.M. is the Samuel L. Wasserstrom Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and a Senior Scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is the founding Director of The Gene Lay Institute. He is also a Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and an investigator in the Klarman Cell Observatory.

Dr. Kuchroo obtained his PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia and completed his postdoctoral studies as a Fogarty Fellow at the National Institutes of Health and later Harvard Medical School. In 1991, Dr. Kuchroo joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School.

His major research interests include autoimmunity – particularly the role of co-stimulation, the genetic basis of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis and multiple sclerosis, as well as cell surface molecules and regulatory factors that impact the induction of T cell tolerance and dysfunction. His laboratory is known for being the first to describe the TIM family of genes, specifically, identifying TIM3 as an inhibitory receptor expressed on T cells, which is now being exploited for cancer immunotherapy. Along with generating several transgenic mouse strains that serve as animal models for human multiple sclerosis, his laboratory was the first to describe the development of pathogenic Th17 cells, which have been shown to induce multiple different autoimmune diseases in humans.

Dr. Kuchroo has published over 400 research articles and is the lead author of a paper describing the development of Th17 cells, which is one of the most cited papers in the field of immunology. He is the recipient of the Javits Investigator Award from the NIH, the Dr. William E. Paul Distinguished Innovator Award from the Lupus Research Alliance, and the MileStones in Research Award and the Dystel Prize for MS Research from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Dr. Kuchroo was named a Distinguished Fellow by the American Association of Immunologists in 2021, among the highest honors bestowed by AAI.

Arlene Sharpe, MD, PhD is the Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard University and Chair of the Department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. She is a member of the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Leader of the Cancer Immunology Program at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center.

Dr. Sharpe earned her MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Sharpe is a leader in the field of T cell costimulation. Her laboratory has discovered and elucidated the functions of T cell costimulatory pathways, including the immunoinhibitory functions of the CTLA-4 and PD-1 pathways, which have become exceptionally promising targets for cancer immunotherapy. Her laboratory currently focuses on the roles of T cell costimulatory pathways in regulating T cell tolerance, effective antimicrobial and antitumor immunity, and translating fundamental understanding of T cell costimulation into new therapies for autoimmune diseases and cancer.

Dr. Sharpe has published over 400 papers and was listed by Thomas Reuters as one of the most Highly Cited Researchers (top 1%) in 2014-2023 and a 2016 Citation Laureate. She received the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Tumor immunology in 2014, the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize in 2017, the SITC Smalley Award in 2020, and the Switzer Prize in 2023 for her contributions to the discovery of PD-1 pathway. In 2022, she received the FASEB Excellence in Science Lifetime Achievement Award, the AAI Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Rous-Whipple Award from the American Society for Investigative Pathology. Dr. Sharpe is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine and a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research, National Academy of Inventors, the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer and the American Association of Immunologists.

Ramnik Xavier is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.  He is also director of the Broad’s Immunology Program and co-director of the Broad’s Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program. He is the Kurt J. Isselbacher Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; director of the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology and Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH); and co-director of the Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics at MIT.

His laboratory focuses on systematic characterization of genetic variants to understand the regulation of barrier defense, innate and adaptive immunity; chemical biology to control cellular disease phenotypes suggested by human genetics; molecular mechanisms to determine roles of the microbiome in health and disease; and development of computational approaches to uncover patterns of human and microbial pathway regulation during disease and treatment.