I was born in Seoul, South Korea, but spent most of my childhood in the Pennsylvania countryside after my family emigrated to the United States. I am a first-generation college student and attended Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA on full financial aid and scholarships. I was one of those kids who had no idea what to study in college until I stumbled on to a research project that examined the cell cycle in brewer's yeast. When I saw that replacing a mutant yeast gene with a healthy human gene could rescue cell division deficits, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I graduated from Dickinson in 2001 with a B.S. degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. After graduation, I moved to Connecticut, where I worked as a Research Associate at a biotech company. Here, I helped create methods to modify the yeast and mouse genomes for the purposes of drug discovery. After two years of gloomy New England weather, I headed south to attend graduate school at Duke University in Durham, NC where I completed my Ph.D. in pharmacology in 2009. My Ph.D. work examined growth factor signaling in the developing brain, and I completed this work with Michael Ehlers, M.D., Ph.D. I then moved a few miles down Tobacco Road and became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I began my time in Chapel Hill in the laboratory of Klaus Hahn, where I learned the basics of protein engineering and design. I then applied these methods to uncover how disease-linked mutations impact UBE3A function during brain development. This work was completed with Mark Zylka, who is currently the Director of Neuroscience at UNC. I joined the faculty of the Department of Neuroscience at the Washington University School of Medicine in January, 2017.
Selected Honors and Awards
Ruth K. Broad Biomedical Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship
Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics Postdoctoral Fellowship
F32 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award
Simons Foundation Bridge to Independence Award
Brain and Behavior Research Foundation NARSAD Young Investigator Award
Whitehall Foundation Research Award
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship