Vijay Rathinam, DVM, PhD

Vijay A. K. Rathinam, DVM, PhD

Assistant Professor, Immunology

UConn Health

Dr. Vijay Rathinam is An Assistant Professor of Immunology and the Associate Director of Immunology Graduate Program at UConn Health School of Medicine. He received his Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine from Madras Veterinary College, India and Ph.D. from Michigan State University. He completed his postdoctoral training in innate immunity in Dr. Kate Fitzgerald’s laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. His laboratory at UConn Health aims to identify key molecular mechanisms in innate immune sensing and inflammasome signaling that govern the regulation of immune responses. His lab recently uncovered how LPS gains access to the cytosol during bacterial infections and identified outer membrane vesicles (OMV) produced by Gram-negative bacteria as a vehicle that delivers LPS into the cytosol triggering caspase-11-dependent inflammasome responses. He is a recipient of the Herbert Tabor Young Investigator Award in 2012 from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The Rathinam lab is supported by the National Institutes of Health.