Ms. Karina L. Bursch received her Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry from the Catholic University of America (CUA) in 2019. During her undergraduate career at CUA, she studied the roles of keratin 19 in estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer in the laboratory of Dr. Byung Min (Justin) Chung. She joined the Medical College of Wisconsin Medical Scientist Training Program in 2019. She is pursuing her Ph.D. in Biochemistry in the laboratory of Dr. Brian C. Smith at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where her research focuses on the biophysical and cellular impacts of cancer-associated missense variants of epigenetic acyl-lysine ‘reader’ proteins. Ms. Bursch received an F30 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Cancer Institute in 2023 and conducts her graduate research as an NIH/NCI predoctoral research fellow.
Dr. Brian C. Smith received his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2003. He then completed his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2008 in the laboratory of Dr. John Denu at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his research focused on the chemical mechanisms of sirtuin protein lysine deacetylases. During his graduate career, he spent a brief period at Genentech in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, where he synthesized drugs that target the inhibitor of the Apoptosis family of proteins. From 2009–2014, Dr. Smith carried out his postdoctoral studies with Dr. Michael Marletta, studying nitric oxide synthases and cysteine S-nitrosation at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. Dr. Smith joined the Medical College of Wisconsin faculty in the Department of Biochemistry in 2014 and was promoted to associate professor in 2020. Dr. Smith’s laboratory focuses on how metabolic and inflammatory stimuli signal epigenetic changes through bromodomain “reading” and sirtuin “erasing” of the histone language. They aim to identify novel strategies to target bromodomains and sirtuins in human diseases such as cancer and diabetes. To enable collaborative chemical and structural biology research, Dr. Smith also co-directs the program in chemical biology and the Structural Genomics Unit at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
