Fellows

Kevin O'Connor

Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Neurology at Yale University. He earned a BS in Chemistry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Tufts Medical School. He took his post-doctoral training in Immunology at Harvard where he also spent several years as an Assistant Professor. His investigative interests are in human translational neuroimmunology, with specific focus on defining the mechanisms by which B-cells affect tissue damage in autoimmunity. To this end, his group is engaged in understanding how B-cell subsets initiate and sustain autoimmunity. His team’s accomplishments include refining the role of Epstein-Barr virus in the multiple sclerosis (MS) brain and further defining the role of autoantibodies in children and adults with MS. They recently identified a network of B-cells that populate the MS central nervous system by trafficking through the cervical lymph nodes. Their current efforts include defining the immunopathology of myasthenia gravis (MG). His group demonstrated that MG antigen-specific T-cells belong to the pro-inflammatory Th17 subset and determined that MG patients harbor defects in B-cell tolerance. Their current focus is on describing the mechanisms of autoantibody production in MG, using high-throughput sequencing, toward the aim of improving therapeutic approaches.