Dr. Meenakshi Rao is a physician-scientist based at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School leading a research program in enteric neurobiology. She is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Associate Director of the Harvard Fellowship Program in Pediatric Gastroenterology.

Dr. Rao graduated summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis and went on to earn her M.D. and Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her graduate work established how retinoids regulate neuronal development in the vertebrate spinal cord through the membrane protein GDE2, uncovering a mechanism coupling cell redox state to differentiation. This work was published in Science and recognized with the Michael A. Shanoff award. Following clinical training in Pediatric Gastroenterology, Dr. Rao pivoted to studying the enteric nervous system (ENS), the large, complex branch of the autonomic nervous system that represents the intrinsic neural circuits of the digestive tract. Her postdoctoral work focused on glia in the ENS – she identified an important marker (Plp1) and generated the first transcriptional profile, showing how they relate to CNS glia. She then demonstrated that these glia are highly unique with a sex-dependent role in orchestrating motility in vivo, challenging long-standing dogma on their essential functions. Earning coveted career development awards from the AGA, NASPGHAN, and the NIH, Dr. Rao established her lab at Columbia University Medical Center and later moved to Boston Children’s Hospital in 2018.

Her laboratory now explores how the ENS interacts with host and microbial systems to modulate gastrointestinal functions and, in turn, how disruptions in these interactions contribute to digestive disorders. Key contributions include: i) delineating the functional heterogeneity of enteric glia and how they regulate peristalsis and innate immunity; ii) pioneering neuroendocrine studies, showing how gonadal hormones signal to the ENS to regulate colonic motor activity, and in turn, how intestinal hormone secreting cells are regulated by neurotrophic factors; iii) demonstrating how microbial toxins hijack ENS circuits to cause disease.