Joseph Craft, MD

Dr. Craft is an AOA graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He did medical and immunology training at Yale and is currently Paul B. Beeson Professor of Medicine and Professor of Immunobiology. He directs a laboratory devoted to understanding of host responses to pathogen challenge and to autoimmunity. His lab was among the 4 that simultaneously dissected the transcriptional regulation of T follicular helper cells, a finding listed among the most significant milestone discoveries in T cell development by the journal Nature and has made sentinel discoveries defining targets of the immune response in lupus and the role of T cells in driving pathogenic autoantibody and mechanisms of T cell mediate tissue damage in that disease. He has trained over 40 postdoctoral fellows and 26 PhD and MD/PhD graduate students including those currently in his lab. He is director of the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Yale and has directed the Investigative Medicine MD to PhD program at Yale for over 20 years, training 70 MD/PhD students. Dr. Craft is a two-time NIH MERIT Awardee, 10-year NIH grants, recipient of the Yale Bohmfalk Basic Science Teaching Prize, an elected Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, past chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors at NIH/NIAMS, and a former Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences.