Kanneboyina Nagaraju, PhD, DVM, is an immunologist with special expertise in pathogenesis of autoimmune and genetic muscle diseases. He is the Director of Mouse Preclinical Drug Testing Facility at the Children’s National Medical Center and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Nagaraju’s research group is involved in a) defining the mechanisms of muscle fiber damage and dysfunction in autoimmune (e.g., myositis) and genetic (e.g., LGMD2B) muscle diseases using gene and protein expression profiling techniques, b) identifying molecular mechanisms underlying the sex-based differences in immune response and disease, c) generating novel mouse models and improving existing mouse models to investigate disease pathogenesis, and d) performing preclinical drug trials in mouse models of autoimmune and genetic muscle diseases.