Dr. Pora Kim joined McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston, formerly UTHealth Houston School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI) on October 16, 2020, as an Assistant Professor. Prior to this position, Kim was a Research Assistant Professor (2018-2020) and Postdoctoral researcher at McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics (2016-2018), the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) of Vanderbilt University (2014-2015), and Ewha Research Center for System Biology (ERCSB) of Ewha Womans University (2013-2014).

After receiving her M.S. in Bioinformatics with Chemistry B.A. from Ewha Womans University in 2005, she spent three years in IT and bioinformatics companies (ETRI and Macrogen). With a craving for more specific bioinformatics study, she rejoined ERCSB for the Ph.D. course and she received a Ph.D. in bioinformatics (2009-2013) mentored by Professor Sanghyuk Lee.

Dr. Kim's research expertise lies in computational biology for precision medicine based on accurate cellular mechanisms with bioinformatics and AI approaches. She was awarded the Outstanding Investigator Award in 2020 by NIGMS with a study aiming to infer the origin and functional aspect of new genes using bioinformatics and deep learning approaches. Her studies come from fundamental biological questions and go in the direction of identifying the molecular targets of therapeutics. Dr. Kim's established multiple bioinformatics pipelines and models to describe the key features of diverse biological phenomena will identify diverse therapeutic targets in human disease.

For more information, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/porakim.

Education

• PhD, Bioinformatics, 2013, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea
• MS, Bioinformatics, 2005, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea
• BS, Chemistry, 2003, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea

Areas of Expertise

• Bioinformatics and Biological Database
• Precision Medicine Development
• Deep Learning Modeling of Genomic information