Michael B Brenner MD is the E. F. Brigham Professor of Medicine, at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Cell Profiling Single Cell Genomics Core and Director of Cell and Molecular Immunology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Selected honors include: Election to the National Academy of Sciences, and ranked “Highly Cited Researcher” in 2023 and 2024 by Clarivate (rank in the top 1% by citations for field of research in the Web of Science citation index). 

Brenner’s laboratory designs and implements high dimensional immunophenotyping, single cell and spatial transcriptomic analyses and functional studies to deconstruct human autoimmune disorders. In recent studies in the T cell field, his laboratory defined a new T helper cell population called T peripheral helper T (Tph) cells that are pathologically expanded in many autoimmune diseases and drive B cell responses and antibody production. Recently, his laboratory described granzyme K expression as defining the major tissue CD8 T cell population expanded across a range of autoimmune diseases.  They showed that granzyme K drives a newly identified pathway of complement activation. His laboratory has defined the central role of fibroblasts in inflammation, tissue damage and fibrosis, including novel subsets of highly inflammatory fibroblasts expanded in RA, the role of Notch signalling in fibroblast differentiation and the role of the LIFR-LIF axis in autocrine amplification of pathologic fibroblast activation. He currently co-leads the Technology Core for that AMP AIM consortium in the single cell deconstruction of RA. SLE, Sjogren’s Disease and psoriatic disorders. Together, these studies are “reconstructing” the immunopathology of RA and other autoimmune diseases.    

In the innate T cell field, Brenner’s laboratory discovered gd T cells and was the first laboratory to identify the lipid antigen presentation mediated by CD1 molecules.