Dr. Pora Kim joined the UTHealth 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 UTHealth SBMI (2016-2018), 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 translational bioinformatics and computational biology studies in human diseases. She was awarded the Outstanding Investigator Award in 2020 by NIGMS with the study aiming to infer the origin and functional aspect of new genes using bioinformatics and deep learning approaches. Her studies come from the fundamental biological questions and go in the direction of identifying the molecular targets of therapeutics. She is studying to develop models to describe and best features of the diverse biological phenomenon, eventually aiming to identify therapeutic targets in real human disease data.

For more information, please visit https://compbio.uth.edu/.

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