Harikesh S Wong

The Wong lab investigates how groups of cells assemble, communicate, and compute to collectively determine the fate of immune responses—whether they are unleashed against harmful threats, diverted toward tolerance, or repurposed to support tissue physiology. 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 multicellular regulatory circuits in intact tissues. Many of our ongoing projects focus on T cells as a paradigm because subtle shifts in multicellular interactions can dramatically alter the fate of immune responses, leading to the elimination of pathogens and tumors, the induction of tolerance toward harmless foreign entities (e.g., commensal organisms), or the initiation of autoimmune disorders.