Nicole Lai, Ph.D.

Dr. Nicole Lai is a Principal Scientist at the Food Allergy Science Initiative (FASI). She brings a distinctive combination of expertise in neuroimmunology, gut biology, and drug discovery to her work with FASI investigators and scientific partners. Dr. Lai helps advance food allergy research, translate foundational discoveries into studies of human biology, validate the findings, and create opportunities for developing new therapies. She also contributes to the Food Allergy Medicines Accelerator™ (FAMA™) and helps make FASI’s emerging science accessible to donors, families, and the public.

Before joining FASI, Dr. Lai spent more than three years at Kallyope, a biotechnology company focused on diseases involving communication between the gut and the brain. There, she led a food allergy program from target identification and validation through lead optimization and biomarker development. She also collaborated with FASI Scientific Founder Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov to evaluate a potential therapeutic target and understand how it worked in laboratory models of food allergy.

Dr. Lai completed her doctoral research in the laboratory of FASI investigator Dr. Isaac Chiu at Harvard Medical School. Her work explored how sensory neurons influence gastrointestinal inflammation, gut function, and protection against infections. As the lead author of a study published in Cell, Dr. Lai helped show that nerves within the gut can actively shape microbial and immune responses, a finding that expanded the field’s understanding of how the nervous and immune systems communicate.

Earlier in her career, Dr. Lai conducted research at the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT and Harvard, contributing to studies of how the immune system recognizes and responds to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Dr. Lai earned her Ph.D. in Biological and Biomedical Sciences from Harvard Medical School, where she also completed a certificate in Leder Human Biology and Translational Medicine. She earned her B.A. and M.A. in Neuroscience and Behavior from Wesleyan University and completed specialized training in microbial population analysis at the Marine Biological Laboratory.