Vijay K. Kuchroo

Dr. Vijay Kuchroo is the Samuel L. Wasserstrom Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, Senior Scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Co-Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity, Brigham Research Institutes, Boston, and Director of the Evergrande Center for Immunologic Diseases at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Vijay Kuchroo is also an associate member of the Broad Institute and a participant in a Klarman Cell Observatory project that focuses on T cell differentiation. 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. Dr. Kuchroo first described the inhibitory receptor TIM-3, which is being exploited as a target for cancer immunotherapy. He was first to describe the development of highly pathogenic Th17 cells, which has been shown to induce multiple different autoimmune diseases in humans. He has published over 325 original research papers in the filed of Immunology and a paper describing development of Th17 authored by Dr. Kuchroo has been one of the highest cited papers in Immunology.

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 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.

Dr. Kuchroo has 25 patents and has founded 6 different biotech companies. He also serves on the scientific advisory boards of a number of big pharmaceutical companies including Pfizer, Novartis, Sanofi/Genzyme and Glaxo-Smith-Klein (GSK).