Dr. Rao completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard College and then MD and PhD in Immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine, where he studied T cell-mediated allograft rejection. He then completed internal medicine and rheumatology fellowship training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and joined the faculty as Assistant Professor in 2018. Dr. Rao is currently Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Physician and a practicing rheumatologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Rao is an internationally recognized expert on T cell abnormalities in rheumatic diseases. He has co-authored over 90 publications and has delivered numerous presentations at national and international meetings, including plenary and keynote presentations, on T cell-B cell interactions, cellular immune profiling, and single cell genomics approaches. He led studies that first described the T peripheral helper cell subset in rheumatoid arthritis, a cell population that is now the target of several therapeutic trials. He has led numerous studies defining T cell phenotypes associated with diverse autoimmune diseases, including lupus, scleroderma, undiagnosed diseases, and checkpoint inhibitor-associated immune related adverse events. He has received career development awards from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and in 2022 he delivered the Edmund DuBois Memorial Lectureship, awarded by the American College of Rheumatology to an outstanding junior investigator in lupus research. He co-directs the Center for Cellular Profiling at BWH, which he co-founded in 2021. He has served on the Committee on Research for the American College of Rheumatology and is currently on the Board of Directors for the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies (FOCIS). He is an enthusiastic mentor, and in 2022 he received the Award for Mentoring for the Harvard Medical School Biomedical and Biological Sciences graduate program.