Carina Seah

Carina Seah came to the MD PhD program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2019 from the University of Southern California, where she concurrently earned her Bachelor’s degree in Human Biology and Master’s degree in Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, working in Dr. Justin Ichida's lab to uncover therapeutics using hiPSC and in vivo models for ALS.

At Icahn Mount Sinai, Carina completed her PhD in the department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences under the mentorship of Laura Huckins and Kristen Brennand. Her work aims to decipher the joint role of inherent genetics and environmental traumatic exposures on the molecular mechanisms underlying PTSD, using a combination of large scale genetic screens, stem cell modeling, and computational -omics on post-mortem brain tissue. She has served as a voting member of the MSTP admissions committee and as a teaching assistant for the MD PhD biomedical sciences course.

Carina is passionate about ensuring equity throughout science and medicine, and was an Anti-Racism Fellow in 2022 and 2023, working to develop a curriculum to mitigate biological essentialism– the conflation of immutable biological factors with social factors such as race, gender, and ability. She has also served on an institution-wide committee assessing the use of race in clinical algorithms, after advocating for the elimination of a ‘race-correction’ factor in an algorithm for kidney function.

Additionally, as an MSTP student, she is a Chronic Care Senior Clinician at EHHOP, helped lead the Human Rights and Social Justice program, Womxn Who Lift, Sinai Women in MSTP, and the Human Rights Clinic.

Carina will complete her MD PhD training in 2026. Outside of the lab and the hospital, she loves film photography, yoga, playing piano, and throwing a perfect dinner and cocktail party.