Zuri Sullivan, Ph.D.

I am a Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Assistant Professor of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and HHMI Hanna H. Gray Faculty Fellow. My lab studies how and why infections make us sick – the mechanisms by which neuroimmune interactions give rise to sickness behavior during infection, and how sickness behavior impacts host and microbial fitness. My interest in host-microbe interactions began as an undergraduate researcher in the lab of Eric Rubin studying the pathogenesis of mycobacteria. Since then, I have studied human immunity to HIV and tuberculosis as a Fulbright Scholar in Durban, South Africa, mucosal immunity in the gastrointestinal tract as a PhD student with Ruslan Medzhitov at Yale, and neural control of social behavior during sickness as postdoc with Catherine Dulac at Harvard. The longstanding goal of my work is to bridge immunology and neuroscience in order to understand the mechanistic basis of sickness as a host defense strategy.