Wendy Garrett

Wendy Sarah Garrett is an American microbiologist and the Irene Heinz Given Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. She holds a joint position in the Departments of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Early life and education
Garrett was a medical student at Yale University. She remained there for her doctoral research, where she studied the regulation of endocytosis in the development of dendritic cells. She was a Research Fellow the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard University Medical School.

Research and career
Garrett investigates host-microbiota interactions in health and disease. She is interested in the interplay between the gastrointestinal immune system and the gut microbiome, particularly in the context of inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer. She has shown that the gut microbiota influence both innate and adaptive immune populations, contributing to immune homeostasis and disease. She identified specific microbial species, pathways, and metabolites that impact health and disease states.

Garrett has investigated the microbes and immune cells that play a role in carcinogenesis and intestinal homeostasis. She has developed approaches that combine meta-omics, microbiology, cellular immunology, biochemistry, cell biology, and cancer biology. To uncover fundamental biological mechanisms and apply findings to precision medicine, Garrett combines mouse models, human specimens, and mammalian and bacterial cells, as well as in vivo and in vitro model systems.

She has shown that Fusobacterium nucleatum, a microbe of the mouth, is abundant in colon tumours. She believes that this could be an early indicator of carcinogenesis.

In 2017 she established a microbiome biobank at Harvard. The biobank is the most comprehensive collection of specimens in the world, using samples of people from the Nurses' Health Study and other long-term cohort studies. In 2020 she was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, who awarded her the Marian W. Ropes, MD Award in 2023.