Rate My Professor Bryan Bryson

Bryan Bryson is an Associate Professor of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a Core Member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, and holder of the Phillip and Susan Ragon Career Development Professorship. He earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering from MIT. After completing his doctorate, Bryson pursued postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Sarah Fortune at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he focused on the interactions between Mycobacterium tuberculosis and the host immune system, sparking his interest in leveraging biological engineering for tuberculosis research. He joined the MIT faculty in 2018 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2025.

The Bryson Lab integrates immunoengineering, molecular microbiology, synthetic biology, systems biology, and computational modeling to investigate host-pathogen dynamics, with a primary emphasis on Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection, the leading cause of death from infectious disease. The group's research dissects the role of innate immune cells, such as phagocytes, in controlling bacterial infection at scales from single cells to whole animals. They develop novel tools to query and perturb the phagosome and identify bacterial antigens displayed on infected cells for vaccine design, covering proteins from the type 7 secretion system across diverse human genetic backgrounds. Bryson's influential publications include 'Seq-Well: portable, low-cost RNA sequencing of single cells at high throughput' (Nature Methods, 2017), 'Efficient integration of heterogeneous single-cell transcriptomes using Scanorama' (Nature Biotechnology, 2019), 'Variability in tuberculosis granuloma T cell responses exists, but a balance of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines is associated with sterilization' (PLoS Pathogens, 2015), 'Multimodal profiling of lung granulomas in macaques reveals cellular correlates of tuberculosis control' (Immunity, 2022), and 'Learning the language of viral evolution and escape' (Science, 2021). With over 5,900 citations on Google Scholar, his work advances single-cell analysis, computational biology, and tuberculosis immunology, contributing to new therapeutic and vaccine strategies.