Isaac Chiu, HMS Immunology

Isaac was born in San Diego and grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts. He worked in the lab of Dr. Jack Strominger as an undergraduate student at Harvard College, where he worked on the trafficking of MHC molecules in immune cells. He obtained his PhD in Immunology at Harvard Medical School, working in Dr. Mike Carroll’s lab on the role of microglia and T cells in the neurodegenerative disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and then as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Tom Maniatis’s lab on the same research area. To study the neurobiology of pain, Isaac worked in Dr. Clifford Woolf’s lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, determining the role of nociceptor neurons and pain in bacterial host defense.

About the Chiu Lab
Our goal is to understand the role of neuro-immune interactions in host defense and inflammatory diseases. We have found that peripheral sensory neurons directly sense microbes to produce pain during infection. and regulate the immune response. Neural reflex circuits that play a key role in modulating innate and adaptive immune responses. Targeting neural signaling to immune cells could lead to novel strategies to treat inflammatory and infectious diseases