Sara L. Prescott
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-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.