Dorothee Kern | |
|---|---|
| Born | 19 January 1966 (1966-01-19) (age 60)[1] Halle, Germany |
| Spouse | Gunther Kern |
| Children |
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| Awards | |
| Academic background | |
| Education | |
| Thesis | NMR-spektroskopische Untersuchungen zur Dynamik der Cis-trans-Isomerisierung am Prolin und deren Katalyse durch Cyclophilin (1995) |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Biochemistry |
| Institutions | Brandeis University |
Dorothee Kern (born 1966) is a professor of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology atScripps Research[2] and former player for theEast German national basketball team.[3]
In 2016, she cofounded Relay Therapeutics,[4] a Massachusetts-based drug research company studying the motion of proteins using genomic data andcomputational biology.[5] In 2020, she cofounded MOMA Therapeutics, a company working on drug discovery.[6]
In 2017 she became a member of theGerman Academy of Sciences Leopoldina,[7] a scientific advisory body to the German government and citizens that serves as a liaison between the German scientific community and the rest of the world.[8]
Born inHalle, a town in formerEast Germany, to parents Gerhard and Gertraude Hübner, she was an energetic child who began learning to play basketball as early as age seven. She achieved her goal of playing for the East German national basketball team by the time she was a teenager playing the position point guard,[9] and she served as captain of the team.[10] Both of her parents were employed by Martin Luther University asbiochemists.[9]
Growing up inCommunist East Germany, Kern and her family experienced backlash and obstacles from the government due to their lack of support of the Communist party. The Hübner family would not work in conjunction with the East German government or their loyal police force, theStasi.[3] This led to surveillance of the family by the government, as well as the loss of her mother's job and the stunting of her father's career. Due to the division between East and West Germany and the Communist Party, scientists in East Germany rarely had the opportunity to collaborate with scientists from the West, thus limiting the Hübner family's access to other research, tools, and scientific equipment that researchers utilized in the West Germany.[9]
Kern attendedMartin Luther University in Halle, Germany and received her B.S, M.S, and Ph.D. in biochemistry from the institution.[9] She also attendedUC Berkeley where she completed postdoctoral work.[10]
Kern is married to Gunther Kern and has two daughters, Julia and Nadja.Julia Kern attendedDartmouth College and is a member of theUS Ski Team, participating in thecross-country skiing event. Nadja Kern attendedUC San Diego and played on the women's basketball team at the university.[11] She is now attending graduate school atUCSF studyingbiophysics.[9]
She has published papers on, and continues to research,protein folding, especially usingNMR techniques.[12] Examples of her research include the activation of proteins[13] and changes in protein shape and the connection toallosteric regulation.[14]
Kern's major research area of focus involves protein dynamics and how proteins move over time. Along with her father and husband, Kern published a paper onVitamin B1 enzyme activation and was able to record the process unfolding utilizing a combination ofNMR spectroscopy,X-ray crystallography, andbiological computing.[9]
This granted Kern notability in the scientific community and ultimately paved the way for hertenure at Brandeis University where she continued her investigation of protein movement. After the founding of Relay Therapeutics in 2016,[15] she began to apply her previous protein research to cancer biology. Along with her research team at Brandeis, Kern published a paper detailing their discoveries in which they utilized high-level biological computing and imaging to study the evolutionary shifts in protein structure of certain proteins and enzymes commonly involved in cancer over three million years of evolutionary history.[16] This research was highly praised by the scientific community and has many potential future implications in specific targeting of anti-cancer drugs to cancer cells without affecting healthy cells.[9]
Following this work, she was inducted into the German Academy of Scientists Leopoldina in 2017.[7]
In 2020, Kern cofounded MOMA Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company studyingmolecular machines and their role in disease.[17] The goal of MOMA Therapeutics is to develop new drugs using the knowledge of molecular machines, proteinconformational changes, and enzyme-substrate interaction in order to deliver medications more precisely.[18]
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