Clifford Woolf, M.B., B.Ch., Ph.D.

For too long the immune and nervous systems have been studied separately, even though they evolved to work together in many instances. It is now time to explore their coordinated and integrated activity both in homeostasis and disease states like allergy.

Clifford Woolf is the director of the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and a professor of neurology and neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. His lab group is devoted to investigating the way in which the functional, chemical, and structural plasticity of neurons contributes both to the normal function and diseases of the nervous system. Their work looks at primary sensory and motor neurons, and the interaction of neurons and immune cells, using a multidisciplinary approach spanning stem cell, molecular and cell biology, electrophysiology, neuroanatomy, behavior, and genetics.