Prof. Bruce Walker Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, USA

Bruce D. Walker, M.D. is the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Professor of Immunology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. He is the founding and current director of... read morethe Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, whose mission is to create cross-disciplinary collaborations in order to harness the immune system to prevent and cure human disease. In addition to his clinical duties as an Infectious Disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, his research focuses on cellular immune responses in chronic human viral infections, with a particular focus on HIV immunology and vaccine development. He leads an international translational clinical and basic science research effort to understand how some rare people who are infected with HIV, but have never been treated, can fight the virus with their immune system.

Dr. Walker is also an Adjunct Professor at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in Durban, South Africa. He is a co-founder of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for TB and HIV (K-RITH, recently renamed the Africa Health Research Institute, AHRI), an initiative initially funded by HHMI to build a state-of-the-art TB/HIV research facility at the heart of these dual epidemics in South Africa.

Dr. Walker is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), the American Association of Physicians (AAP), and the National Academy of Medicine. He received his M.D. from Case Western Reserve University and his B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Colorado, and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1980.