The Institute for Computational Medicine is pleased to announce that Dr. Rachel Karchin has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure effective July 1, 2013. Dr. Karchin holds appointments with the Institute for Computational Medicine, the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the Department of Computer Science in the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, as well as with the Institute of Genetic Medicine in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The focus of her research is the development of computational methods to assess the impact of DNA sequence variation on human health. In 2009, she received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to support research in modeling missense mutation. In April of 2013 she will receive a National Science Foundation Advances in Biological Informatics Innovation Grant. This 3-year, $695K award will fund her research collaboration with Dr. Manel Camps of the University of California, Santa Cruz, to develop a new method to model higher order mutation interactions by combining evolutionary genetics, network models, and protein sequence analysis. Dr. Karchin has also received funding from the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and she enjoys many productive collaborations with research faculty in the School of Medicine’s Department of Oncology and elsewhere within Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Raimond Winslow, Director of the Institute for Computational Medicine states “Dr. Karchin is blazing a new frontier of cancer biology in which computational modeling will be used to identify the gene mutations which drive tumor progression. Ultimately, this computational approach will lead to more personalized, precision cancer therapies. Her work is receiving international recognition, and we are all proud that she is a part of the Institute for Computational Medicine”.

more information on Dr. Karchin’s work.

Please join us in congratulating Rachel on this tremendous achievement!