Who he is

As a Health Research Board Immunology Scholars Research Fellow, I completed my PhD in Prof. Paul Moynagh’s Molecular Immunology Lab at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, where I investigated how the evolutionarily conserved E3 ubiquitin ligase Pellino3 regulates anti-viral immune responses in macrophages. For my postdoctoral training at Yale University as a Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America Research Fellow, I studied mucosal immunity from multiple perspectives, including mechanosensation in immune cells and the translation of novel non-canonical open reading frames within previously misannotated non-coding RNAs. I discovered that IL-18 released from epithelial and immune cells depletes epithelial goblet cells and drives pathogenic inflammation in ulcerative colitis. Notably, these classical sources of IL-18 were insufficient for protection against Salmonella infection, leading to my identification of enteric neurons as a critical new source of IL-18 essential for host defense. This established a novel neuro-immune axis in mucosal immunity.

What he does

Our laboratory investigates how the nervous and immune systems interact to maintain gastrointestinal (GI) health and respond to disease. A major focus of our work is deciphering how the enteric nervous system (ENS) senses mechanical forces through mechanosensors like Piezo1 and how these signals influence gut motility, barrier function, and inflammation. By using advanced tools such as optogenetics, genetics, and physiological assays, we explore how neural activity not only coordinates peristalsis but also shapes immune responses, limiting tissue injury and aberrant inflammation in disease states such as colitis and cancer. In parallel, our lab is committed to uncovering and defining the roles of genomic “dark matter”—non-classical open reading frames (nORFs) and other recently discovered elements that defy traditional annotation. We apply state-of-the-art computational genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics to systematically identify and functionally characterize these elusive elements. Our goal is to understand how nORFs and other hidden transcripts are regulated, how they contribute to cellular and tissue homeostasis, and their potential roles in health and disease. By integrating these research themes, we aim to advance our understanding of the molecular and neural networks that govern gut physiology and to illuminate new, unconventional regulators encoded within the genome, ultimately opening new avenues for diagnosis and therapy in GI and systemic diseases.