Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (during review, HHMI / Harvard Medical School, Liberles lab)
- Orientation: Cellular and molecular basis of airway and visceral sensation; genetic dissection of vagal sensory neuron types and the epithelial ‘sentinel’ cells they read out from
Key contributions
- Lead author of Prescott & Liberles (2022), the Neuron review of the internal senses of the vagus nerve.
- First author of the vagal airway sensory atlas (Prescott et al. 2020, Cell), which used genetic control of vagal neuron types to define airway-protective sensory programs including the P2RY1 (NP19) water-sensing neurons underlying laryngeal protective reflexes.
- Work centres on the respiratory tract as a sensory surface — how the airway detects water, irritants, stretch and mechanical threat and converts them into protective reflexes.
Key papers
Connections
- Related researchers: Stephen D. Liberles
Lead author of Prescott & Liberles (2022) and the wiki’s specialist in the airway as a sensory surface. Her own primary contribution — the 2020 Cell atlas of vagal airway sensory neurons — is one of the review’s load-bearing citations: it used genetic tools to define distinct airway-protective sensory programs and identified the small cluster of P2RY1 (NP19) neurons that sense laryngeal water and trigger the coordinated protective reflex (expiration, vocal-fold adduction, swallow, apnea) that keeps water and food out of the lungs.
That work is the concrete example behind the review’s respiratory section and behind the Respiratory interoception page’s receptor-level detail: airway protection is not one broadly-tuned “irritant” sense but a set of labelled lines, each with its own receptor, cell type and reflex. During the review she moved from the Liberles lab at Harvard/HHMI to her own group at MIT.
Placement
Read with Stephen D. Liberles, her senior co-author. Where Liberles’s reach spans all three visceral systems, Prescott’s centre of gravity is the respiratory tract — the channel this wiki separately argues is exceptional among interoceptive systems (Respiratory interoception), here characterized at the level of the individual sensory neuron.