Congratulations to Katie Lee!

Cell and Molecular Biology Ph.D. Student Katie Lee was Selected for the prestigious George Orton and Mona Marie Elmore ARCS Award in Medicine. This $5,000 award will be given in May 2022. The ARCS Scholar Award provides unrestricted grants to outstanding U.S. scholars in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and health fields.

The non-profit ARCS Foundation Inc. comprises 15 chapters across the nation working to keep the United States competitive in STEM fields. Since its founding in 1974, the totally volunteer Honolulu Chapter has provided more than $2.3 million in unrestricted grants to 548 University of Hawai‘i graduate students, providing annually a dozen $5,000 awards to students in the university’s Colleges of Natural Sciences, Engineering, and Tropical Agriculture; Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology; and Institute of Astronomy. More at https://www.uhfoundation.org/impact/research/gift-endows-arcs-advancing-science-awards.

Katie Lee was born and raised in Hawai’i, I have lived on this island my whole life. I developed an interest in science with encouragement from my parents and teachers that culminated in a B.S. degree in biochemistry at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. During my undergraduate studies, I was fortunate to be accepted into the CURE program at the Cancer Center which kicked off my career in research. I joined Dr. Peter Hoffmann’s laboratory to study melanoma and continued this with the INBRE program. After graduation, I was accepted into the Cell and Molecular Biology program at JABSOM as a Ph.D. student and immediately joined Dr. Ralph Shohet’s laboratory studying cardiovascular disease. My thesis project examines cardiac metabolism using mice missing a key glycolytic enzyme that was shown to increase in expression after cardiac injury.