Rebecca Gillani is a physician-scientist who specializes in multiple sclerosis. She completed her undergraduate training at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2003, majoring in Cell and Structural Biology. She completed a senior thesis research project under the mentorship of Bill Greenough studying the neurodevelopmental disorder fragile X syndrome. She then joined the MD/PhD Program at Loyola University Chicago. She completed her doctoral work in the laboratory of Wendy Kartje, where she used anti-Nogo-A immunotherapy to enhance neuroplasticity in a model of stroke.

After completing an internship in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, she joined the Mass General Brigham Neurology Residency at Harvard Medical School. After completing residency in 2015, she began a combined clinical fellowship in multiple sclerosis at Mass General under the mentorship of Eric Klawiter, and postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Elly Nedivi at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In her postdoctoral work, she defined basic principles of circuit wiring in the visual cortex with in vivo two-photon imaging, and super-resolution imaging with magnified analysis of the proteome. Now as a faculty member of the Mass General Department of Neurology, she applies the techniques she mastered in her postdoctoral work to dissect neurodegeneration in multiple sclerosis. Besides her research program, Dr. Gillani cares for patients with multiple sclerosis and other neuroimmunological disorders.