Research

W. Allan Walker, MD
Professor of Pediatrics, Chief

Phone: 617-726-7988
Fax: 617-724-1731
Email: wwalker@partners.org

Curriculum Vita


Dr. Walker's primary responsibilities at Massachusetts General Hospital involve overseeing the Mucosal Immunology and Developmental Gastroenterology Laboratories at Building 114 MGH-East as part of the Gastroenterology and Nutrition Division at MGHfC at Harvard Medical School. These laboratories have five principal investigators, six postdoctoral fellows and two graduate students who study oral tolerance, gut inflammation and microbial-epithelial "crosstalk." His research efforts include defining the passive and active protective properties of human breast milk with regard to the protection from disease during the newborn period. Dr. Walker also studies the development of human intestinal host defenses using human fetal organ cultures, cell lines, and xenograft transplant models. Specifically, his laboratory has reported that the human fetal epithelium responds inappropriately to both endotoxin and exotoxins, which helps to explain an increased incidence and severity of certain inflammatory and secretory diarrheas in this age group.  More recently, they have studied the effect of initial colonizing microbiota on the development of mucosal protective function and the mechanism of probiotics in this process.

Research team
Catherine Cahill, PhD - Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Kriston Ganguli, MD - Instructor of Pediatrics
Di Meng, MD, PhD - Instructor of Pediatrics
Meiqiang Weng, MD - Instructor of Pediatrics
Vasuki Wijendran, PhD - Instructor of Pediatrics.
Weishu Zhu, MD - Instructor of Pediatrics