Overview

Dr. Rengarajan received her PhD from Harvard University in 2001 where she studied transcriptional regulation of T-helper cell differentiation. She remained at Harvard to complete her post-doctoral fellowship and then as a Research Associate in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health, where her research focused on the pathogenesis of tuberculosis (TB). In September 2007, Dr. Rengarajan joined Emory University and is now an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine and is a member of the Emory Vaccine Center. Dr Rengarajan is also an Emory Global Health Institute Distinguished Faculty. She has developed a research program in the area of bacterial pathogenesis and host immunity with a focus on TB research and vaccine development.

Research Description:
We are interested in understanding how pathogens evade host immunity and how to harness this knowledge to develop new therapies and effective vaccines. Tuberculosis (TB) provides an excellent system to dissect the molecular basis of infection due to the dynamic interactions between Mycobacterium tuberculosis and immune cells. M. tuberculosis is one of the worlds most successful human pathogens and is responsible for the deaths of approximately 2 million people annually. The AIDS pandemic and MDR-TB further underscore the global public health challenge that TB presents.

Research in my laboratory centers on the pathogenesis and immune response to TB in mice, macaques and humans. Building on my background and expertise in basic immunology, microbiology, genomics and proteomics, my research seeks to understand the dynamic host-pathogen interface in TB and determine how Mycobacterium tuberculosis evades host innate and adaptive immunity to cause disease. Using functional genomics approaches, we identified the set of M. tuberculosis genes that are critical for its ability to grow within macrophages. These studies provided key insights into how M. tuberculosis adapts to intracellular environments. We are studying several of these genes in detail to understand the biochemical and molecular basis of their functions in pathogenesis and how they modulate macrophage and dendritic cell (DC) pathways to impact antigen-specific T cell responses. These studies have been funded through R01, U19 and R21 grants from the NIH and have led to the identification of new mechanisms employed by M. tuberculosis to evade host immunity. We are now applying insights gained from these studies towards designing novel immune therapeutics and more efficacious vaccines for TB.

I am involved in human studies aimed at defining correlates of protective immunity and biomarkers for TB diagnosis and treatment. In collaboration with clinical colleagues at Emory, I have established patient-based studies profiling T cell responses to Mtb in latent and active TB patients in the metro Atlanta area and am involved in several international partnerships and collaborations. Moreover, through ongoing collaborations with investigators leading the Regional Prospective Observational Research for Tuberculosis (RePORT) consortia in India and Brazil, we are investigating the performance of candidate host biomarkers for diagnosing Tb and monitoring response to treatment. I serve as Project co-PI on a multicenter U19 Tuberculosis Research Unit (TBRU) award from NIAID focused on identifying antigen-specific T cell signatures associated with immune control and persistence of M. tuberculosis infection in humans in cohorts based in Atlanta and in Kisumu Kenya in collaboration with the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) and the CDC, and in a nonhuman primate model of TB and chemotherapy in partnership with the Tulane Primate Center. I also serve as MPI on two R01 grants focused on understanding Mtb-specific T cell immunity to latent TB in nonhuman primates and how SIV perturbs immune control to reactivate TB. In addition to my research activities, I am actively involved in mentoring junior faculty at Emory and in teaching and training several undergraduate students, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and research scientists over the last ~20 years of my career.

Academic Appointment

• Associate Professor of Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine

Education

Research