Butte Lab

Biography

Manish J. Butte, MD PhD is a Professor with tenure in the Department of Pediatrics at UCLA, with joint appointments in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics and Human Genetics. In Pediatrics, he is Chief of the Division of Immunology, Allergy, and Rheumatology. He holds the E. Richard Stiehm Endowed Chair, honoring one of the founders of the field of pediatric immunology.

Manish was born in Philadelphia, grew up in New Jersey, and studied Physics and also earned his M.D. at Brown University in the eight-year Program in Liberal Medical Education. He then studied structural biology at UCSF and graduated with a Ph.D. in Biophysics. Returning to clinical training, he completed a Pediatrics residency at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a clinical fellowship in Allergy & Immunology at Boston Children's Hospital. He did post-doctoral research at Harvard. He spent his junior faculty years at Stanford University (2009-2016) and moved to UCLA in late 2016.

A major research focus of his research is to study T cells, the coordinating cells of the immune response, with projects on infections, autoimmunity, vaccines, metabolism, and cancer. This work has been funded by the NIH, NSF, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and philanthropy.

The second major focus of his lab is rare, genetic immune diseases (also called primary immunodeficiency or inborn errors of immunity). He cares for children and adults with rare diseases in his clinic, which is an endowed Center of the Jeffrey Modell Foundation. He is a co-Investigator in the NIH-funded Undiagnosed Diseases Network and he helped found the UCLA California Center for Rare Diseases. This work has been funded by the NIH, companies, and philanthropy.

Dr. Butte's lab has trained 8 PhD students (5 completed and 3 currently), 6 postdocs (5 completed, 1 currently), and mentored many undergraduate and graduate students. His lab has published over 130 papers with over 15,000 citations. He was elected into the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2021. He was elected as an inaurgural Fellow of the Clinical Immunology Society in 2021.