Lab Members

Carla Kim, PhD. - Principal Investigator
Dr. Kim is interested in the relationships between stem cell biology, cancer biology, and lung biology. Carla earned her doctorate in Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As a graduate student in the laboratory of John Petrini, she studied the role of the Rad50 gene in DNA damage responses and homeostasis in vivo. She found that a point mutation in the murine Rad50 gene led to bone marrow failure (likely due to hematopoietic stem cell failure) as well as increased suseptibility to hematopoietic malignancy. These studies stimulated her interest in determining if stem cells played a role in the initiation of cancer. She went on to a postdoctoral position in the laboratory of Tyler Jacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Cancer Research. There, she developed a method to isolate the first stem cell population from the adult murine lung, termed bronchioalveolar stem cells (BASCs). She also showed that BASCs are critically affected by an oncogenic K-ras mutation and may be the cell-of-origin of lung adenocarcinomas.

email: carla.kim@childrens.harvard.edu

Post-Doctoral Fellows

Sima Zacharek, PhD
Sima completed her graduate studies in Genetics and Molecular Biology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Since joining the lab in November of 2006 she has become interested in the molecular mechanisms regulating BASCs, and in the development of genetic tools to study BASC function in vivo.

email: sima.zacharek@childrens.harvard.edu

Kerstin Sinkevicius, PhD
Kerstin joined the lab in January 2008 and is interested in examining the role of human cancer stem cells in lung cancer growth, recurrence, and metastasis. She graduated with a degree in chemistry from Grinnell College in 2001 and received her PhD in cancer biology from the University of Chicago in 2007.

email: kerstin.sinkevicius@childrens.harvard.edu

Eva Leder, MD
Eva is a board certified Pediatrician and a clinical fellow in Pediatric Pulmonology at Children's Hospital Boston. She received her MD from the Universtiy of Vienna, Austria and completed pediatric residency training at Schneider Children's Hospital, Albert Einstein school of Medicine in New York. Eva joined the lab in July 2008 and is interested in studying the role of BASCs in physiologic lung development and lung injury.

email: eva.leder@childrens.harvard.edu

Research Technicians

Rebecca Roach
Becca was the first member of our lab and joined after completing her undergraduate degree in Biology from the University of Central Oklahoma. Becca is using inducible GFP expression to analyze cell turnover in the normal lung, in response to lung injury, and as a less biased approach to investigate cancer stem cells in lung adenocarcinoma.  

email: rebecca.roach@childrens.harvard.edu

David Gludish
David earned his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and a Master of Science, Biochemsitry degree both at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He is developing a transplant assay to study the potential of mouse lung epithelial stem cells in vivo, and is investigating methods to trace epithelial repair by stem cells following lung injury in mice.

email: david.gludish@childrens.harvard.edu

Graduate Students

Stephen Curtis
Steve attended Cornell University as an undergraduate where he majored in Molecular and Cell Biology and studied in the Laboratory of Alexander Nikitin, MD, PhD (characterizing a novel model of soft tissue sarcomas). He is currently a graduate student in the department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard Medical School and joined the Kim Lab in 2007. Steve is interested in the interplay between stem cells and cancer and is working to understand the role of BASCs in the propagation of lung adenocarcinoma.

email: stephen.curtis@childrens.harvard.edu

Dave Raiser
Dave completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Richmond, where he studied biology. In the Kim lab, he works on elucidating the role of BASCs in lung injury repair through the development of an orthotopic transplantation model. Additionally, he is interested in marking BASCs in vivo for the purposes of lineage-tracing during development, normal lung homeostasis, and injury repair. His favorite thing about the lab is finding new ways to play with dry ice, and he is known about the lab as "Flava" or "the loud one." Dave can usually be found wearing some shade of brown and rocking out to Bossa Nova in the bay.

email: david.raiser@childrens.harvard.edu

Rotation Students

Annie Phuong Vo
Annie is a first year graduate student in the Harvard Biological and Biomedical Sciences program. She graduated from MIT with a Bachelor in Biology and has been doing research in cancer metastasis and therapeutic discovery. Annie just started her rotation in the lab this October and is interested in the tumor-formation ability of BASCs.

Undergraduate Students

Alan Chou
HSCI Summer Undergraduate Research Program 2007
Alan performed studies to validate gene expression data in lung tissue sections during his summer in our lab. He is currently a Pre-Med majoring in Biology at Harvard University.

Suzanne Nizza
Suzanne completed a rotation in our lab in 2008. She is a member of the Harvard BBS Program.

Emrah Er
Emrah completed a rotation in our lab in 2007. He is a member of the Harvard BBS Program and the John Blenis Lab.

To apply for a position in the Kim Lab:
Send a curriculum vitae and request three references letters to be sent to:
carla.kim@childrens.harvard.edu