Assistant Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School

Assistant Professor of Surgery Harvard Medical School

Chen Institute Department of Medicine Transformative Scholar (2024-2026) Massachusetts General Hospital

Assistant Physician Pulmonary & Critical Care, Massachusetts General Hospital

Physician Investigator (Cl) Pulmonary, Mass General Research Institute

MD Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine 2013

PhD 2013

B.A., Neuroscience Johns Hopkins University 2005

biochemistry; bronchiectasis; ciliopathies; critical care; extracorporeal membrane oxygenation; genetic diseases; genetics; lysosomal disease; molecular biology; organelles; pulmonary disease; pulmonary fibrosis

Raghu Chivukula, MD, PhD is Assistant Professor of Medicine and Surgery at Harvard Medical School, Group Leader in the Center for Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In addition to directing a research program, he attends to patients at Mass General in the intensive care unit and co-directs the Mass General adult pulmonary genetics program.​

Raghu studied cellular and molecular neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University prior to medical and graduate training in human genetics and molecular biology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He completed a residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, clinical fellowships in pulmonary disease and critical care medicine at Harvard Medical School, and postdoctoral research training at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. His work has been recognized by the Michael A. Shanoff Award, Forbes Magazine “30 Under 30”, the Parker B. Francis Fellowship, the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists, the Donahoe Catalyst Award, the American Society for Clinical Investigation Young Physician-Scientist Award, and as a Chen Institute Department of Medicine Transformative Scholar.

The Chivukula Lab is grounded in the belief that rare human genetic disorders can (1) illuminate fundamental principles in cell biology and (2) reveal new treatments for common and uncommon disease alike. These ideas have already paid huge dividends in heart disease and cancer and are growing in scope as medical practice increasingly incorporates molecular genetics.

We are currently most interested in monogenic disorders of proteostasis and organelle quality control. It is now clear that proteostasis and organellar defects, often manifested by subcellular protein aggregation, are common during aging as well as diverse human disease states. Uncovering the molecular basis of such disorders is difficult owing to limitations in model systems and a poor understanding of the initiating events in complex, often age-related diseases. We are therefore taking a genetics-driven approach to meet this challenge. Our strategy focuses on leveraging human genetic syndromes that phenocopy sporadic proteostasis and organellar diseases but have a single defined cause amenable to mechanistic investigation in the laboratory. We employ model systems including cultured immortalized cells, primary human stem cell cultures, and mouse models of disease and apply molecular biology, biochemistry, mass spectrometry, advanced microscopy, and functional genomics approaches to tackle these questions!