Research Interests

While my early strong interest in chemistry and biology were rooted in plain curiosity about life, I came to know later that biological study has had and will have a huge impact on human welfare by improving the practice of medicine. Learning about the fruitful interaction between basic science and clinical practice made me determined during graduate school to find a way that my future studies would contribute.

As NF-kB has critical roles in both innate and adaptive immune function, it seems important to me to understand how a single pathway can control different physiological responses in a stimulus-specific manner. In addition, recent studies have emphasized that deregulation of NF-kB is not only associated with immune deficiency but a large number of immune cell tumors. This convinces me that NF-kB should be studied not as a linear pathway but as part of a complex cellular web of signaling interactions that do not only control NF-kB target genes (inflammatory and anti-apoptotic) but other processes as well. In my postdoc project I hope to uncover novel NF-kB interacting proteins that may not only regulate inflammatory responses (as the IkBs do) but also provide crosstalk to other cellular functions. With novel signaling regulators and/or interactions I hope to develop my own research field that is not based on the idea of linear pathways but rather networks of signaling components, such that multiple functionalities are affected by the activation or disease-associated de-regulation of a single signaling molecule.