September 2026 - Murillo is selected to present his work as a talk at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Brazilian Society of Immunology - ImmunoFoz.
September 2026 - Welcome to Ina Bando, a graduate rotation student from the Harvard Program in Neuroscience.
September 2026 - It's official! Ashwarya joins the lab for her Ph.D. thesis.
August 2026 - Congrats to Ryan on a terrific talk on enteric glia at the Cold Spring Harbor Glia meeting!
August 2026 - Bid farewell to Elise Courtney, who is off to graduate school at Tufts for not one but two Masters in Biomedical Engineering and Innovations Management.
August 2026 - Excited that Nature Neuroscience chose our recent manuscript for a companion "Research Briefing" piece that aims to capture the highlights of the science for a broad audience.
Check out the paper and the Research Briefing in Nature Neuroscience highlighting our work.
Summer 2026 - Summer students Nick (Bunker Hill), Kaitlyn (Rivers HS), Abhi (Northeastern), Bella (Taiwan), and Isabella (Northeastern). +
May 2026/July 2026 - Murillo presents a poster at Gordon Research Conference on Neural Circuits and the Rainin Innovations symposium.
May 2026 - Congratulations to Mira for an outstanding senior thesis awards recognized with the Harvard Hoopes and Faye prizes. We are delighted that you are returning to the Harvard community as a medical student after a year as a Schwarzmann fellow in Beijing!
April 2026 - At the ENS meeting Lia presents a poster, and Amy gives a talk and wins the award for one of two top selected abstract talks at the meeting. +
March 2026 - Check out our lab’s latest publication in Neuron by talented former Ph.D. student Anoohya Muppirala who set out to learn whether the nervous system in the gut has different types of glial cells and, if so, what makes them different from each other and from glia in the brain. The answer is a resounding yes!
March 2026 - Maryam presents a poster at Gordon Research Conference on Lymphatics.
December 2025 - Our annual holiday bowling and secret Santa gift exchange! +
December 2025 - Welcome to Leslie Hernandez, a graduate rotation student from the Harvard Program in Immunology.
November 2025 - Congratulations to Murillo Duarte Silva for being awarded a CCFA fellowship to support his efforts to understand how androgen signaling to neurons modulates inflammatory colitis.
October 2025 - Congratulations to Amy Shepherd for being awarded a Charles King Trust fellowship to support her efforts to understand how enteric glia regulate enteroendocrine cells.
September 2025 - A great start to the academic year as Maryam Dadabhoy is selected as a HHMI Gilliam Fellow. Congratulations, Maryam! Welcome to Ryan Brown, Ph.D., a recent graduate of the University of Virginia joining Team Glia as a postdoctoral research fellow.
August 2025 - At the biannual American Neurogastroenterology & Motility Meeting, Melissa is selected for the Young Investigator program and shares her findings on intrinsic primary afferent neurons (IPANs) in the ENS, and Mira rocks her first poster presentation at a national scientific conference.
July 2025 - We bid farewell to Afiya Quryshi who initially joined our lab as an undergraduate research intern from Harvard University and then stayed on as a technician, working closely with Melissa Musser on Team CGRP. She is off to medical school at Columbia University! Welcome to Dong Lee, a recent graduate from Colby College, who joins the lab to fill those big shoes.
Summer 2025 - We had the pleasure of hosting an outstanding group of undergraduate summer research interns, Maryam Jimoh (The College of Wooster), Nahed El Fiky (University of Maryland), and Mira Jiang (Harvard University) with the generous support of fellowships from the AGA.
July 2025 - Murillo shares his exciting findings on androgen-dependent neuroimmune interactions at the Rainin Innovations Symposium in Hawaii.
June 2025 - It's official! Lia joins the lab for her Ph.D. thesis.
June 2025 - Welcome to Ashwarya Devason, a graduate rotation student from the Harvard MD-PhD program, and Grace Aboussleman, a M.S. student in Bioinformatics from Boston University.
May 30, 2025 - An epic summer party to celebrate Anu's graduation and wish Perry Mitchell well as she heads off to graduate school at the University of Michigan. Perry spearheaded our pain work and was a critical contributor to many other ongoing studies. We will miss her and are delighted to see her grow her passion for neuroscience in graduate school!
May 29, 2025 - Graduation Day!
May 2025 - So much to celebrate this month!
- Kudos to Murillo Duarte Silva for publishing a Preview in Neuron highlighting a recent study showing that there are conserved responses to gut inflammation across the peripheral nervous system, which link interferon signaling to ferroptosis.
- Congratulations to Viktoriya Kalinina for successfully defending her thesis at Brandeis, graduating with a B.S. in Biochemistry, and joining the postbac program at University of Chicago. We are excited to see you continue your scientific training!
- Welcome to graduate rotation student Caroline Pierotti from the Harvard Program in Neuroscience.
April 2025 - Welcome to graduate rotation student Kayla Colvin, from the Harvard BBS Program.
March 2025 - Kudos to Maryam Dadabhoy for a terrific poster presentation at the HHMI meeting on the ENS.
December 2024/January 2025 - Welcome to graduate rotation students Kathleen Navas, from the Harvard Program in Neuroscience, and Lucy Wesemann, from the Harvard Immunology Program.
December 2024 - Our annual holiday bowling and secret Santa gift exchange tradition continues! This year it was also a bittersweet farewell to Anu, who heads off to a postdoctoral fellowship at Genentech in San Francisco. We are so excited to see what you do next!
Kudos to Anu Muppirala and Amy Shepherd who were selected to present at the Little Brain Big Brain Meeting and attend the Federation of Neurogastroenterology & Motility Meeting in Bangkok, Thailand.
November 2024 - Congratulations to Melissa Musser for receiving the NASPGHAN Foundation/Alcresta Research Award providing two years of research support, and being invited to give a talk at the annual meeting!
September 2024 - The 1st annual BCH GI Division Research Retreat was a huge success - an opportunity to hear about really exciting science and hang out with great colleagues. And we finally got everyone in one place to take a new lab picture....
September 9, 2024 - We celebrated the successful thesis defense of Anu Muppirala from the Harvard Program in Neuroscience. Congratulations, Dr. Muppirala! A special thanks to colleague Dr. Christoph Thaiss for making the trip to Boston to be an examiner and giving a seminar to the Harvard Digestive Disease Center community.
September 2024 - Welcome to Lia D'Alessandro, a graduate rotation student from the Harvard Program in Neuroscience, and welcome back to Ariel Robinson, MSc, joining the lab as a Research Technologist!
Summer 2024 - We had the pleasure of hosting an outstanding group of undergraduate summer research interns, Annie Yuan (Bunker Hill Community College), Maryam Jimoh (The College of Wooster), and Viktoriya Kalinina (Brandeis University) with the support of fellowships from the AGA and the BCH Kirby Center for Neurobiology.
August 2024 - Congratulations to Anu Muppirala for winning the coveted Ben Barres Prize at the biannual Cold Spring Harbor Glia meeting and delivering an outstanding talk on glial diversity in the ENS!
June 2024 - Congratulations to Melissa Musser, MD, PhD, for winning a highly competitive BCH Faculty Career Development Award to support her work on primary afferent neurons in the ENS.
June 2024 - Welcome to Elise Courtney, a microbiologist joining Team Glia in the lab as a research assistant.
May 23, 2024 - Graduation Day!
May 2024 - Congratulations to Anu Muppirala for receiving an Albert J. Ryan fellowship, a national award in recognition of her Ph.D. thesis work!
April 26th & 30th, 2024 - In an epic 4-day span, we celebrated the successful thesis defenses of Aleks and Valen from the HMS Immunology and BBS programs, respectively. Congratulations Drs. Prochera and Lagomarsino!
April 2024 - Welcome to Kayla Kruger and Emily Kellogg, graduate rotation students from the Harvard Program in Neuroscience.
March 2024 - ENS Meeting 2024 - Kudos to Valen and Anu for giving outstanding talks at this biennial international meeting of enteric neurobiology.
January 2024 - Welcome to Trent Pottala, a graduate rotation student from the Harvard Program in Neuroscience, and Vicky Hajjar, a co-op student from Northeastern University.
December 2023 - Bowling and our annual secret Santa gift exchange, a wonderful way to celebrate a banner year for the Rao lab before we took a break for the holidays!
November 2023 - It's out! The RET receptor tyrosine kinase is well known to be essential for ENS development but its functions in the mature gut have been less clear. In this work spearheaded by postdoctoral fellows Amy Shepherd, Svetlana Sabel and Laurence Feinstein, we show that RET acts as a molecular brake in enteroendocrine cells, limiting the nutrient-dependent secretion of the gut hormones PYY and GLP-1 to regulate intestinal motility.
Check out the paper and the Research Highlight in Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology summarizing our work.
October 2023 - It's out! Excited to share the results of our close collaboration with Min Dong's lab, showing how a microbial toxin targets specific cells in the colonic neurovascular complex (gut intrinsic and extrinsic peptidergic neurons as well as pericytes) to drive fulminant inflammation. Blocking this neuropeptide signaling dramatically alleviates infection.
Check out the paper in Nature.
Kudos to John Manion and colleagues in Min's lab, Melissa Musser and Amy Shepherd in our lab, as well as Gavin Kuziel in Seth Rakoff-Nahoum's lab, for driving this work forward. A dream team!
Learn more @: https://answers.childrenshospital.org/c-diff-inflammation/
Check out the manuscript and the accompanying News & Views piece in Nature.
October 2023 - Welcome to Christian Lagares Linares, a graduate rotation student from the Harvard Program in Neuroscience.
September 2023 - It's official! Maryam joins the lab for her Ph.D. thesis.
August 2023 - Congratulations to postdoc Amy Shepherd for being selected to participate in this year's ANMS Young Investigator Forum and giving a killer talk at the ANMS meeting in Austin, TX!
July 2023 - Welcome to Murillo Duarte Silva, a postdoctoral fellow joining the lab to advance the study of androgen signaling in gut neurobiology.
Summer 2023 - We had the privilege of hosting a phenomenal group of undergraduate and medical students who worked with us this summer: Neha Mani (Columbia), Ivy Natabi (Bunker Hill), Mira Jiang (Harvard), Afiya Quryshi (Harvard), Avery Alperin (U Rochester), and Gamze Sonmez (Hacettepe University, Turkey). So glad that many of you will stay involved with the lab!
June 2023 - Congratulations to Harry Rosenberg for completing his residency and fellowship training in Pathology. We are so excited you will be staying in the neighborhood as a faculty member at Brown University and continue to work on unraveling the biology of human enteric glia!
May 2023 - Congratulations, Aleks! Her review titled "Enteric glial regulation of the gastrointestinal epithelium" is published in a special issue of Neuroscience Letters that is dedicated to our favorite glial cells!
Check it out: 10.1016/j.neulet.2023.137215
April 2023 - Welcome to Janki Patel, a graduate rotation student from the Harvard Program in Neuroscience.
March 2023 - Welcome to Jana Erlmoser, a M.S. candidate in Molecular Medicine from the University Medical Center Göttingen who joins us for her thesis project.
January 2023 - Welcome to Maryam Dadabhoy, a graduate rotation student from the Harvard Program in Neuroscience.
November 2022 - The world premiere of our lab video! Check out this 2-minute video highlighting our scientific mission, made possible by the Smith Family Foundation. Thanks to the Foundation for its efforts to advance science communication and the research support provided by the Odyssey Award, which has jumpstarted exciting projects in the lab over the past 2 years.
September 2022 - Amy Shepherd is selected to attend the Little Brain Big Brain Conference in Germany - a fantastic tradition of the ENS community!
August 2022 - A fantastic party to bid a bittersweet farewell to Ariel Robinson, a research assistant moving on to graduate school at Wesleyan University. Ari not only made tremendous scientific contributions, she guided our lab through a global pandemic and a period of major expansion. We can't wait to see what you do next!
July 2022 - Congratulations to Melissa Musser for completing her fellowship training and receiving a Shore grant award to support her career development as a physician-scientist!
June 2022 - Welcome to Perry Mitchell, a new research assistant joining the lab, and Avery Alperin, an undergraduate summer research intern from University of Rochester!
June 8, 2022 - Thrilled to welcome an outstanding set of speakers for the Harvard Digestive Disease Center/gNeuro spring symposium on the Neurobiology of Digestion: Cells, Circuits and Immunity.
June 1, 2022 - Congratulations to postdoc Amy Shepherd for the award recognizing her for giving one of the best research presentations at Boston Children's Hospital, Folkman Research Day!
May 2022 - Digestive Disease Week 2022 - Kudos to Amy for giving an outstanding standing-room-only talk and Melissa for being recognized for her "Poster of Distinction". Great to catch up with GI biology, honor old colleagues, and keep up lab traditions!
May 2022 - Congratulations to Kathryn Grabowski, undergraduate research intern from Boston University, for passing her honors thesis defense with flying colors! We are going to miss you in the lab but look forward to seeing the great things you do next.
April 2022 - RET signaling in the gut homeostasis - turns out the action is in enteroendocrine cells, not neurons! Congratulations to Amy Shepherd, Svetlana Sabel and Laurence Feinstein for tackling the twists and turns of this story to make these discoveries.
Check out the manuscript on Biorxiv.
April 2022 - The Rao Lab heads to Ferrara, Italy for the triennial ENS meeting.
We were honored to have 4 abstracts selected for presentation, including 3 talks! Congratulations to Amy, Melissa, Anu and Aleks for fantastic presentations. This was a wonderful forum for sharing cutting-edge science and meeting colleagues from around the world in an unparalleled setting.
Basking in the post-talk glow!
Ferrara is a UNESCO world heritage site with a castle in the center of town, complete with a moat....
...and a dungeon! 
February 2022 - Welcome to Hannah Farnsworth, a graduate rotation student from the Harvard Program in Neuroscience.
December 2021/January 2022 - Ever wondered if your hormones are affecting your bowels? Turns out they are and the ENS mediates a major part of their effects! Check out our latest story, now in press at JCI. This was a labor of love and a huge team effort, spanning three institutions and bridging observations made at the bench in mice with observations made at the clinic in patients with a common digestive disorder.
Check it out: https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI150789
August 2021 - Congratulations, Harry! His review titled "Enteric glia in homeostasis and disease: From fundamental biology to human pathology" is published in the Gut-Brain axis special issue of iScience.
Check it out: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.102863.
Summer 2021 - Celebrating good weather, summer students, and the return of in person conferences!
May 24, 2021 - Our first in person lab meeting in nearly 15 months - feels so good to be together again and engaging in scientific discussions without "Gallery View"!
Congraulations to Jordan Mubako, one of 6 undergraduate students nationwide selected for the 2021 AGA-Aman Armaan Ahmed Family Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF). Welcome back to the lab!
May 2021 - We bid adieu to Kristina Perez, graduating from Boston College this month and moving on to an RA position across the country. Kristina was one of the first people to join our lab upon our move to Boston and made many valuable contributions to our ongoing projects. We are sad to see you go but so glad you are continuing your development as a scientist!
March 12th, 2021 - Anu passes her PQE with flying colors and now is officially a Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience. Congratulations, Anu!
March 1st, 2021 - The launch of gNeuro is a success!
This is an interdisciplinary initiative bringing together scientists across Boston interested in gut neurobiology, to promote sharing of tools, ideas and research advances. We are excited to be partnering with Harvard Brain Science Institute (HBI) and the Harvard Digestive Disease Center (HDDC) to launch this group. All are welcome - please contact us if you are interested in participating! Next meeting: May 3, 2021
January 2021 - It's official! Valen joins the lab for her Ph.D. thesis.
November 2020 - Welcome to Valentina Lagomarsino, a graduate rotation student from the Harvard Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences.
July 2020 - Welcome to Melissa Musser, MD, PhD, a clinical fellow in Pediatric GI joining the lab for her postdoctoral research work.
June 3, 2020 - BCH labs officially re-open and we are thrilled to be back in the lab. Masks and social distancing are our new norm for work and play!
May 2020 - Our lab's first paper from BCH is accepted for publication!
The Vil1 gene promoter is often used in GI and gut-brain axis research studies to selectively manipulate gene function in the intestinal epithelium. In the process of validating available tools for use in other work, we unexpectedly found that Vil1-Cre mouse lines that have been widely used for decades have distinct and unanticipated sites of Cre activity, including in the central nervous system. These observations should alter interpretation of previous work using these lines and guide future studies.
We are proud to have collaborated with the Turner and Riccomagno labs on this work and hope that it will be a useful resource for the field.
Coronal section of brain from a VilCre/997; Ai9 mouse reveals widespread tdTomato reporter expression (reflecting Cre activity) in the brain.
April 2020 - It's official! Anu joins the lab for her Ph.D. thesis.
April 2020 - Amy Shepherd is selected as one of the 2020 class of Schmidt Science Fellows. Congratulations, Amy! Well-deserved!
January 2020 - Welcome to Anu Muppirala, a graduate rotation student from the Harvard Program in Neuroscience.
December 2019 - Welcome to Kelly McGovern, a graduate rotation student from the Harvard Immunology program.
Celebrating the holidays and Adriell's time in the lab with japanese-inspired cocktails.
September 2019 - Welcome to Amy Shepherd, PhD, a new postdoctoral fellow joining the lab from the University of Melbourne.
August 2019 - It's official! Aleks joins the lab for her Ph.D. thesis.
June 2019 - Welcome to two new lab members: Ari Robinson, a research assistant, and Aleks Prochera, a graduate rotation student from the Immunology program.
May 2019 - Welcome to Madison Mixer, a rising junior at Colgate University, who is joining our lab for the summer.
April 2019 - Renovations complete, we are thrilled to finally move into our permanent lab space on Enders 6!
December 2018 - Welcome, Salima! We are excited to have Salima back with us as she makes the big move from NYC to Boston.
November 2018 - Congrats to all the speakers for a highly successful mini-symposium at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Advances in Enteric Neurobiology: The "Brain" in the Gut in Health and Disease.
Speakers: Laren Becker, James Bayrer, Milena Bogunovic, and Julia Ganz. Co-chairs: Subhash Kulkarni and Meenakshi Rao.
October 2018 - It's official! The Rao Lab has moved from Columbia University to the GI Division at Boston Children's Hospital.
Enjoying a summer lab happy hour in NYC before our move.
