Speaker

Dr. Vijay Kuchroo is the Samuel L. Wasserstrom Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Senior Scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Vijay Kuchroo is also an Institute member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT,  a senior investigator at Klarman Cell Observatory project and Food Allergy Scientific Initiative (FASI) project. He is the founding Director of the Gene Lay Institute of Immunology and Inflammation at Harvard Medical School,  Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Mass General Hospital, Boston.

His major research interests include autoimmune diseases - particularly the role of co-stimulation - the genetic basis of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis and multiple sclerosis, and cell surface molecules and regulatory factors that regulate induction of T cell tolerance and dysfunction. His laboratory has made several transgenic mice that serve as animal models for human multiple sclerosis.  His laboratory also first described TIM family of genes and identified Tim-3 as an inhibitory receptor expressed on T cells, which is now being exploited for cancer immunotherapy. He was first to describe the development of a highly pathogenic Th17 cells which has been shown to induce multiple different autoimmune diseases in humans.  A paper describing development of Th17 authored by Dr. Kuchroo has been one of the highest cited papers in Immunology. More recently, we have begun to study the impact of neuroimmune interactions at the barrier surfaces in the induction and regulation of tissue inflammation.

Dr. Kuchroo came to the United States in 1985 and was at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda as Fogarty International Fellow for a year before joining the department of pathology at Harvard Medical School as a research fellow. He later joined the Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital as a junior faculty member in 1992. He obtained his degree in Veterinary Medicine from the College of veterinary medicine, Hisar, India. Subsequently, he specialized in pathology at the University of Queensland, Brisbane (Australia) where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1985. He received the Fred Z. Eager Research prize and medal for his Ph.D. research work at the University of Queensland. Based on his contributions, he was awarded the Javits Neuroscience Award by the National Institutes of Health in 2002 and the Ranbaxy prize in Medical Research from the Ranbaxy Science Foundation in 2011. He was named Distinguished Eberly lecturer in 2014 and obtained Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty lecture/prize in 2014. He received William E. Paul prize for excellence in cytokine research from International cytokine and interferon society (ICIS), in 2020. Dr. Kuchroo was inducted as the Distinguished fellow of American Association of Immunologists (AAI) in 2021 and he also received John Dystel prize from the National MS society and American Association of Neurology in 2021. For his outstanding research contributions to the field of immunology, he has been chosen as the receipient of the 2025 AAI-Thermo Fisher Meritorious Career Award.

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