Ramnik Xavier is the Kurt Isselbacher Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Chief of Gastroenterology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is Board Certified in Medicine and Gastroenterology. Ramnik is also the Director of the Center for the Study of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (CSIBD) and a Senior Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Ramnik is clinically active, teaching medical students, residents in medicine, and gastroenterology fellows rotating through the MGH.

Following his clinical training, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Brian Seed in the Department of Molecular Biology at MGH and the Department of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School. The overall goal in the laboratory is to discover and understand the function of important mediators and effectors involved in innate (autophagy, pathogen-containing vacuole) and adaptive (T cell activation) immunity. Of particular interest are the cellular components and regulatory networks, which interact dynamically within temporal, spatial and pathophysiological contexts of innate and adaptive immunity. The lab is pursuing integrative systems approaches that closely couple genome-wide experimentation with high-throughput assays and computational methods.

A second area of focus is to examine the pathway defects associated with genetic variants in IBD/T1D and identify novel small molecules that interrupt signal transduction pathways associated with disease risk.