Venkat Giri Magupalli, PhD

Venkat Giri Magupalli
Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA

Venkat Giri Magupalli is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Pediatrics. His research focuses on innate immune recognition of pathogenic and sterile signals, with a special emphasis on the mechanistic basis of signal recognition by inflammasomes and regulation of inflammatory cell death pathways in healthy and aberrant states.

Dr. Magupalli obtained his Ph.D. with summa cum laude from Saarland University MedicalCenter, Germany, in the laboratory of Dr. Frank Schmitz, where he characterized protein RIBEYE and deciphered how a single protein RIBEYE can build the entire scaffold of synaptic ribbons, and function in ribbon synapses for normal vision. He further pursued his research interest in synaptic transmission with short post-doctoral research with Dr. Bill Catterall at the University of Washington, where he investigated the regulation of neuronal calcium channels by the CaMKII signaling complex.

At that time, the nexus between calcium signaling and inflammasome function was emerging. The dysregulated inflammasome has been implicated in the pathogenesis of many diseases, including intestinal inflammation, obesity, diabetes, ocular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and atherosclerosis. These observations led to his interest in Inflammasome biology and led him to join Dr. Hao Wu’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School to decipher the molecular and functional basis of inflammasome assembly and its druggable modules. The overarching goal of his current research is to unveil the mechanistic basis of inflammatory cell death and hyperactivation.

Dr. Magupalli is a recipient of the 2021/BTREC/CTREC Faculty Career Development Fellowship, Eleanor and Miles Shore Faculty Development Awards Program, and is currently funded by NIH through the R21 grant. He is a member of the American Association for Immunologists, the International Cytokine & Interferon Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.