Kim Sookyung

Sookyung Kim is a graduate of University of Massachusetts Amherst with a BS in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Prior to joining the UMass Med MD/PhD program, she conducted research in the labs of Dr. Cynthia Baldwin, where she identified WC1 homologues of bovine gamma delta T cells in sheep as part of her senior thesis work, and of Dr. Anna Greka, where she worked on developing targeted therapies for chronic kidney disease models and biomarkers for a rare kidney disease. Her interests include understanding how cells respond to different stimuli such as infection, environmental cue/ niche, and available nutrients, with the goal of ultimately harnessing this knowledge to develop more targeted and more accessible therapeutics. She has completed rotations in the labs of Dr. Christopher Sassetti (developing genetic engineering tools for mycobacterial chromosomes), Dr. David Guertin (developing tools to screen for proteins interacting with Sin1, 2, and Rictor and image lipid droplets in cancer cells), Dr. Cole Haynes (identifying alternative mitochondrial dysfunction regulators), and Dr. Michael Green (analyzing exome seq and RNA seq data of cancer cells and analyzing differential 3’ end polyadenylation site on brain tissue from individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder). In 2019, she joined the Haynes lab and is excited to contribute her efforts to deepening the understanding of how cells respond to mitochondrial stress.