Seunghee Kim-Schulze, PhD

Seunghee Kim-Schulze, PhD, is a Facility Director of Human Immune Monitoring Center (HIMC) and associate professor of Department of Immunology and Immunotherapy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Dr. Kim-Schulze graduated with a PhD in biochemistry at University of Illinois, and undertook postgraduate fellowship training at the Northwestern medical school, Imperial College in London, UK and Columbia University Cancer center in New York, focusing on cellular immunology in cancer. She was recruited to Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 2009 to establish the human immune monitoring facility under the guidance of Dr. Miriam Merad with the mission of identification of novel immune biomarkers of disease and response to therapy in patients with cancer and inflammatory disease. Dr. Kim-Schulze studies critical immune responses in cancer patients undergoing investigational cancer vaccines, check point blockade and the combinatorial therapies via the genomic, cellular and proteomic analysis.  Dr. Kim-Schulze has developed multiple clinical protocols for the trials for the cancer immunotherapies and conducted laboratory correlative studies leading to peer-reviewed publications.  She has identified the high PD-1 expression in tumor infiltrating immune cells of melanoma patients had poor prognosis compare to the ones with low level of expression before anti-PD-1 antibody became the revolutionary immune modulating FDA-approved for multiple indications.  Her work also supports shared immune signatures between various cancers and proinflammatory disease. Currently, she is profiling the signatures of cytokines, chemokines and other soluble proteins at the local and systemic level to identify the potential biomarkers in various disease including cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune, neurology, psychiatry and cardiovascular disease.