Manish J Butte

Manish J. Butte, MD PhD FCIS, is the E. Richard Stiehm endowed Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at UCLA, with joint appointments in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics and Human Genetics. He serves as Chief of the Division of Immunology, Allergy, and Rheumatology in the Department of Pediatrics at UCLA. Dr. Butte's research focuses on understanding the genetic, molecular, and cellular roots of immune diseases to develop targeted therapies, with particular expertise in rare primary immunodeficiencies.

Dr. Butte received his ScB in Physics and MD from Brown University, followed by a PhD in Biophysics from UCSF. His clinical training included residency in pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a clinical fellowship in Allergy & Immunology at Boston Children's Hospital. After post-doctoral research on T cells at Harvard, he began his faculty career at Stanford before joining UCLA in 2016.

His laboratory investigates T cell immunology with projects spanning rare immune diseases, infections, autoimmunity, vaccine development, metabolism, and cancer. The lab employs techniques from bioengineering, advanced microscopy, synthetic biology, and genetic sequencing to address fundamental and translational questions in immunology. Dr. Butte's work has been funded by the NIH, NSF, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and philanthropy.

Dr. Butte's research has led to significant contributions in understanding the mechanisms of primary immunodeficiencies, particularly those involving RAG deficiency, PI3K signaling disorders, and interferonopathies. His lab has pioneered approaches using mechanobiology to understand T cell activation and has developed novel biomaterials to enhance immune responses. Recent work has focused on applying artificial intelligence to improve diagnosis of inborn errors of immunity and investigating host-pathogen interactions in coccidioidomycosis (Valley Fever).

Dr. Butte has received numerous honors including election to the American Society of Clinical Investigation (2021) and as a Fellow of the Clinical Immunology Society (2021). He holds the E. Richard Stiehm Endowed Chair at UCLA (2019). His research has resulted in over 150 publications in high-impact journals spanning immunology, cell biology, and clinical medicine.

As an educator, Dr. Butte has mentored numerous undergraduates, PhD students, and postdoctoral fellows. He has been principal investigator on multiple NIH-funded research projects including "Collaborative multi-site project to speed the identification and management of rare genetic immune diseases" (R01AI153827) and "T-cell Dysfunction as the basis of Disseminated Coccidioidomycosis" (R21AI149654). His lab maintains active collaborations with researchers across UCLA and internationally.