Jayaraj Rajagopal (born 1969) is an Indian-American physician-scientist. He is the Bernard and Mildred Kayden MGH Research Institute Chair [1] and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He founded and serves as the Chief of the Stanbury Physician-Scientist Pathway [2] at the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Medicine. His laboratory [3] focuses on epithelial biology, lung stem cell biology, regenerative biology, and lung diseases.
Rajagopal received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude in biochemical sciences from Harvard College, with Hoopes and Henderson Prizes for his work with Jack Szostak and Jennifer Doudna concerning the mechanism of ribozyme catalysis. [4] He then received his MD degree from Harvard Medical School and trained in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he served as Chief Medical Resident [5] and completed subspecialty training in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. After finishing his medical training, he joined Doug Melton's laboratory for postdoctoral studies. While there, he began his work studying the development of the lung.
Rajagopal's research centers on the use of stem cell biology and developmental biology to reframe the cellular basis of lung physiology and disease. He, alongside Darrell Kotton, described the first protocols to direct the differentiation of pluripotent stem cells to airway epithelium. [6] His laboratory then made a fundamental contribution to the field of cellular plasticity when he discovered that a fully mature functional murine or human cell can durably dedifferentiate into a stem cell. [7] His lab also demonstrated that a stem cell can serve as a niche for its own daughter cells, [8] extending the fundamental concept of the niche first described by Ray Schofield. [9] He and Aviv Regiv discovered pulmonary ionocytes and airway hillocks by marrying developmental and computational biology through the use of single cell sequencing technology. [10]
The lungs are the central organs of the respiratory system in humans and some other animals, including tetrapods, some snails and a small number of fish. In mammals and most other vertebrates, two lungs are located near the backbone on either side of the heart. Their function in the respiratory system is to extract oxygen from the air and transfer it into the bloodstream, and to release carbon dioxide from the bloodstream into the atmosphere, in a process of gas exchange. The pleurae, which are thin, smooth, and moist, serve to reduce friction between the lungs and chest wall during breathing, allowing for easy and effortless movements of the lungs.
Massachusetts General Hospital is a teaching hospital located in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It is the original and largest clinical education and research facility of Harvard Medical School/Harvard University, and houses the world's largest hospital-based research program with an annual research budget of more than $1.2 billion in 2021. It is the third-oldest general hospital in the United States with a patient capacity of 999 beds. Along with Brigham and Women's Hospital, Mass General is a founding member of Mass General Brigham, formerly known as Partners HealthCare, the largest healthcare provider in Massachusetts.
Cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) is a membrane protein and anion channel in vertebrates that is encoded by the CFTR gene.
Mass General Brigham (MGB) is a not-for-profit, integrated health care system that engages in medical research, teaching, and patient care. It is the largest hospital-based research enterprise in the United States, with annual funding of more than $2 billion. The system's annual revenue was nearly $18 billion in 2022. It is also an educational institution, founded by Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. The system provides clinical care through two academic hospitals, three specialty hospitals, seven community hospitals, home care services, a health insurance plan, and a robust network of specialty practices, urgent care facilities, and outpatient clinics/surgical centers. It is the largest private employer in Massachusetts. In 2023, the system reported that from 2017–2021 its overall economic impact was $53.4 billion – more than the annual state budget.
Douglas A. Melton is an American medical researcher who is the Xander University Professor at Harvard University, and was an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute until 2022. Melton serves as the co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and was the first co-chairman of the Harvard University Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. Melton is the founder of several biotech companies including Gilead Sciences, Ontogeny, iPierian, and Semma Therapeutics. Melton holds membership in the National Academy of the Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a founding member of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.
Dennis Brown is a renal physiologist. He is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, director of the Program in Membrane Biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and Associate Director of the MGH Center for Systems Biology. He is a member of the MGH Executive Committee on Research (ECOR), the central body for research governance at MGH.
Mark Fishman is an American cardiologist, a professor in the Harvard Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and Chief of the Pathways Clinical Service service at the Massachusetts General Hospital for patients with complex medical disorders. A researcher and clinician in cardiology, he is the previous president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), the main research arm of Novartis Pharmaceuticals.
Carla Faith Bender Kim is a professor at the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a Principal Investigator at the Stem Cell Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. She is also a Principal Faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, where she also serves as part of the Executive Committee.
Air liquid interface cell culture (ALI) is a method of cell culture by which basal stem cells are grown with their basal surfaces in contact with media, and the top of the cellular layer is exposed to the air. The cells are then lifted and media is changed until the development of a mucociliary phenotype of a pseudostratified epithelium, similar to the tracheal epithelium.
Derrick J. Rossi, is a Canadian stem cell biologist and entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of the pharmaceutical company Moderna.
Laurence G. Rahme is an American microbiologist who is Professor of Surgery and Microbiology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). At Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) she also holds the title of Director of the Molecular Surgical Laboratory as a microbiologist in the Department of Surgery and Molecular Biology. Additionally, she holds a Senior Scientific Staff position at Shriners Hospitals for Children-Boston.
Merit Cudkowicz is an American neurologist and neuroscientist who studies amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Cudkowicz is Julieanne Dorn Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, director of the ALS clinic and the Neurological Clinical Research Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and chair of the Department of Neurology at MGH. Cudkowicz has led several large-scale collaborations and clinical trials to test novel treatments for ALS and as of 2020, researching ways to detect early biomarkers of ALS to improve diagnosis.
Alex K. Shalek is a biomedical engineer, and a core faculty member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), an Associate Professor of Chemistry, and an Extramural Member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additionally, he is a Member of the Ragon Institute and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute, an Assistant in Immunology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an Instructor in Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard Medical School. The multi-disciplinary research of the Shalek Lab aims to create and implement broadly-applicable methods to study and engineer cellular responses in tissues, to drive biological discovery and improve prognostics, diagnostics, and therapeutics for autoimmune, infectious, and cancerous diseases. Shalek and his lab are best known for their work in single-cell genomics and for studying a number of devastating, but difficult to study, human diseases with partners around the world.
Irene Georgakoudi is a Greek biophysicist and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University, where her work focuses on developing non-invasive medical imaging techniques based on optical spectroscopy for applications in medical diagnostics and therapeutics.
Robert E. Kingston is an American biochemist and geneticist who studies the functional and regulatory role nucleosomes play in gene expression, specifically during early development. After receiving his PhD (1981) and completing post-doctoral research, Kingston became an assistant professor at Massachusetts General Hospital (1985), where he started a research laboratory focused on understanding chromatin's structure with regards to transcriptional regulation. As a Harvard graduate himself, Kingston has served his alma mater through his leadership.
Franziska Michor is an Austrian computational biologist. She is a professor in the department of data science at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. She serves as Director of the Physical Sciences-Oncology Center and the Center for Cancer Evolution.
Matthew S. Rosen is an American physicist and professor.
Matthew Langer Meyerson is an American pathologist and the Charles A. Dana Chair in Human Cancer Genetics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He is also director of the Center for Cancer Genomics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Director of Cancer Genomics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Eric Liao is an American pediatric surgeon-scientist. He specializes in plastic and reconstructive craniofacial surgery, especially in the surgical treatment of cleft lip and palate, rhinoplasty, otoplasty, and nasal reconstruction. Liao's research interests are focused on the genetics and developmental biology that govern facial formation and craniofacial anomalies. He is the founding director of the Center for Craniofacial Innovation at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the Vice Chair of Academic Affairs in the Department of Surgery, and a Professor of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.
Filip Swirski is a Polish-Canadian-American scientist and educator serving as the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Professor of Medicine, Cardiology and Professor of Radiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and is the Director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute. He is also a member of the Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Institute (BMEII), the Marc and Jennifer Lipschultz Precision Immunology Institute (PrIISM), and The Friedman Brain Institutes (FBI) at Mount Sinai. His research partly focuses on innate and inflammatory mechanisms in cardiovascular disease. He is known for his work in cardioimmunology and notably for linking atherosclerosis with blood monocytosis.