Principal Investigator
Core Member
Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard
Assistant Professor
Department of Biology, MIT
The Wong lab investigates how cells assemble and communicate to control immune responses in tissues.
The immune system mounts destructive responses to protect the host from threats, including pathogens and tumors. However, a trade-off emerges: if immune responses cause too much damage, they can compromise host tissue function. Conversely, if they fail to generate sufficient damage, the host may succumb to a given threat. How is the optimal balance achieved? The Wong lab investigates how cells communicate with one another and their surrounding tissue environment to accurately control the magnitude of immune responses, both in time and space. To this end, we combine the tools of immunology with interdisciplinary methods—including high-resolution fluorescence microscopy, computational approaches, and gene manipulations—to resolve, model, and perturb the control of immune responses in intact tissues. Ultimately, we aim to understand how subtle shifts in control can lead to widely divergent host outcomes, including the successful elimination of threats, tolerance, autoimmunity, chronic infection, and cancer.
Hari completed his PhD in Cell Biology at the University of Toronto. He then pursued his post-doctoral training with Dr. Ronald N. Germain at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 2022, Hari opened his independent lab as a Core Member of the Ragon Institute and an Assistant Professor in the MIT Department of Biology. The Wong lab sits at the interface of Immunology and Systems Biology.
Roberti, J.M., Hecht, F., Gai, E., Steinmetz, I., Holzmeister, S., Straka, T., Wong, H.S., Alvarez, L.
Nature Methods (in press), 2024
Simeonov, D.R.+, Park, K.+, Cortez, J. T., Young, A., Li, Z., Nguyen, V., Umhoefer, J., Indart, A., Woo, J.M., Anderson, M.S., Tsang, J.S., Germain, R.N.*, Marson, A.M.*, Wong, H.S.* +Equal contribution *Co-senior authorship
BioRxiv, 2023
Wong, H.S. & Germain, R.N.
Trends in Immunology, 2021
Wong HS & Germain RN
2018 Semin Immunol 36, 17–27
Gola A, Dorrington MG, Speranza E, Sala C, Shih RM, Radtke AJ, Wong HS, Baptista AP, Hernandez JM, Castellani G., Fraser IDC, Germain RN
2021 Nature 589, 131-136
Wong HS, Park K, Gola A, Baptista AP, Miller CH, Deep D, Lou M, Boyd LF, Rudensky AY, Savage PA, Altan-Bonnet G, Tsang JS, Germain RN
2021 Cell 184, 1–17
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