Igor Kramnik obtained his PhD from the Central Institute for Tuberculosis Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Russia. There he started his studies of lung-specific aspects of anti-tuberculosis immunity and discovered myeloid suppressor cells within pulmonary TB lesions. He continued to study host immunity to mycobacteria at the Center for the Study of Host Resistance at McGill University in Montreal and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, with Emil Skamene and Barry Bloom, respectively. In 1999 he was recruited to the faculty at the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. In 2009 he became an Investigator at the National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory and joined the Pulmonary Center at Boston University. During this period, he developed a mouse model of pulmonary TB that develop human-like necrotic TB granulomas and used this model to reveal the genetic control and mechanisms driving the necrotic pathology. His current research is focused on further dissecting the interplay of the host and bacterial factors leading to immunopathology in TB and the development of host-directed therapies to improve the outcomes of TB.